Garden to Table - Celebrating with Tongan Food and other delights!

 We have been celebrating food from around the world at Garden to Table this term - from the Cook Islands and Italy to, more recently, Tonga. 

Our menu for Tongan language week was: 

- chop suey

- keke Vai (Tongan pancakes) 

- coconut cookies (Masi Samoa) 

  

We have been using all our seasonal vegetables to create lots of delicious recipes - greens to make risotto and fritters and pizza, lemons to make muffins and bliss balls and carrots to add to our ANZAC biscuits or just eat raw! 

 

We tried using a purple carrot in the ANZAC biscuits recipe instead of the usual orange carrot - it had a fascinating effect! The mixture started off purple, then went blue, after cooking it went green! 

We've also been getting through our kumara stash and collecting bean seeds!

 

 

 

 

 

Garden to Table with Room 3 & 6

 When life gives you lemons... make LEMONADE! ... and lemon muffins, lemon bliss balls and lemon cake!  Or just cut up and eat the lemons as they are! 

Room 3 and Room 6 have had a wonderful 5 weeks of Garden to Table making many different dishes using the lemons and the winter veggies from the garden. They have made: 

• Chop suey 

• herby breadsticks

• pumpkin curry 

• air fryer cauliflower 

• corn fritters 

• kumara scones

Growing and decorating gourds was also a new, interesting experience for the students. 

Our most popular recipes can be found on this blog under the 'Garden to Table & Recipes' tab.  

There's more recipes linked in the text too. Can't find the recipe you're after? Just ask Victoria or Miss Long for it. 

Kumara Season!

This week at Garden to Table we celebrated a milestone:

harvesting the first of our kumara for the season!

David and the senior students had worked hard creating an excellent

new kumara bed, and we are hoping for a great crop this year!

Before the harvest, we said a karakia (blessing). Following tradition, the first harvest of kumara is presented to a respected elder,

and this honour was given to Mrs Hurley.

This tradition reflects practices that many Māori growers still follow:

• Begin harvest with karakia

• Respect Rongo-mā-Tāne

• Keep first-fruit traditions in some form

• Emphasise careful handling and curing

Room 5 and Room 2 have been busy the last few weeks!

Other exciting activities they have been doing include:

• The great compost bucket race! 

• Building Bliss Ball snowmen

• Eating lots of juicy greens from the garden in our veggie pasta

• Getting a good dose of Vitamin C with the first of our lemons

• Discovering carrots can be RED!