‘A Year In The Kitchen Garden’ book launch October 2012

Hooray – our beautiful book ‘A Year In The Kitchen Garden‘ has arrived! After much, much work, blood, sweat and tears, Emma & Grace – parents at the school – proudly delivered their bouncing baby: ‘A Year In The Kitchen Garden’… a thick and tactile beauty chock full of wonderful photos of our kitchen garden, delicious recipes gleaned from prominent chefs and the school community (some with great illustrations from the children!) and also our day-to-day recipes prepared in the cottage… The most amazing parts of the book detail the process of setting up the program from scratch – what the parents did with the blank canvas of the school playground and how they transformed the cottage, organised the grants and motivated the workers. The story is truly inspirational & a must-have for any schools trying to start the program on their own – as well as being a great Chrissie gift for anyone remotely interested in food! Well done ladies!

So I was greatly honoured to be asked to organise the book launch – Wednesday 31st October, a sit-down lunch for about 30 people. I had about a month to organise the roster and menu – notwithstanding preparing and bottling for the school fete held the weekend before – and eventually ended up galvanising 76 children and 27 adult helpers into action over 2 days of prepping, chopping, stirring, cooking, labelling, starting, finishing and serving! It was a massive job and results were gratifying.

We also had the benefit of our new pizza oven in action too – Phillip and his mama Rosa came to help stoke the wood fire all morning and prepare bread for the lunch as well as cook our asparagus, the crispy kale, the grissini and the two different sorts of pizza…!

The day was a fabulous success, the children were absolutely wonderful in everything that they did, and were especially efficient and gracious waiters, and the VIP guests that attended (Kylie Kwong & Janni Kyritsis among the stars) were all suitably blown away by the professionalism!