Posts Tagged With: children

Soft parmesan polenta with poached eggs and sage

From the garden: sweetcorn, eggs, sage

Recipe source: adapted from a recipe on the Wholefoods House website

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This is such a vibrant and comforting dish, with the frizzled sage leaves giving everything a crispy, colourful lift. Just be sure the eggs are very fresh!

Equipment:

  • Chopping board & small knife
  • Grater
  • Scales
  • 1 heavy-based saucepan & lid
  • Garlic press
  • Measuring jug
  • 1 small saucepan
  • Salad spinner
  • Paper towel
  • Wooden spoons
  • Bowls – 4 small
  • Medium frying pan
  • Serving bowls
Ingredients:

  • 1 large corn cob
  • 1 garlic clove
  • 100g coarse polenta
  • 50g grana padano
  • Extra-virgin olive oil
  • 6 very fresh large eggs
  • 75g goats’ cheese (or other soft white cheese)
  • 30 sage leaves
  • Flaked salt and black pepper

What to do:

  • Remove jacket and silk from corn, and with a small sharp knife shear the kernels off. Add them to the heavy-based saucepan.
  • Peel and crush the garlic with the garlic press and add it to the corn with 500ml water and bring to the boil over a moderate flame.
  • Rain in the polenta, stirring. Cover & reduce to a mere simmer 15 mins, stirring every few minutes. Grate the parmesan.
  • When the polenta is ready, remove the lid, beat in the parmesan and season well.
  • Meanwhile, to poach eggs, fill the medium sized frying pan 5cm deep with water and bring to a simmer. Fill the large bowl with cold water. Carefully crack each egg into a small bowl without breaking it and then carefully slide into the water. Let the pan sit for 4 minutes before removing each egg into the bowl of cold water with a slotted spoon.
  • Wash the sage leaves and spin them dry. Heat the olive oil in a small saucepan over medium heat. Add the sage and cook, stirring, for about a minute or until they are dark green, crispy and fragrant.
  • To serve, divide polenta among serving bowls. Crumble goats’ cheese over then place an egg on top of each serving. Season generously and scatter with the frizzled sage leaves & scented olive oil.

Notes: What is polenta? What is cooking by ‘absorption’ method? Why shouldn’t we break the eggs when poaching them? What does ‘fragrant’ mean?

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School Holiday Program 2012

How exciting! We’ve just announced our inaugural School Holiday Program for 2012… Head on over to the School Holiday Program page to see the deets but I can also say we’ll be cooking (and digging!) up a storm!

These are some of the fab activites we’ll be doing:

Rolling hand-made pasta and throwing pizza dough for lunch –

Earning your own Our Kitchen Garden knife licence as we chop, slice and dice the organic herbs and veggies we’ve harvested from the garden –

Meeting and feeding the chooks –

Planting seeds for a take home ‘watch & grow’ project so bring your own plastic bottle destined for recycling or landfill –

Creating your own seasonal, local and organic morning tea and lunch while learning some amazing life skills in the kitchen and garden –

And of course, having fun!

LIMITED SPACES ONLY!

DOWNLOAD Our Kitchen Garden booking form HERE!

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April 5th 2012

And here we are at the last day of term! What a lovely start to the year… some great cooking, fabulous volunteers & creative and delicious children! Thank you to everybody 🙂

This week has seen us celebrate our season with fabulous fat eggs from our five chooks – they are truly settling into their strides with huge beautiful offerings every day: over 50g each, just like in the shops! So in honour, we’re creating a Poached Egg Salad with Tarragon Sauce, Sean’s Sweetcorn Chowder, our version of Torta Pasqualina, a few handmade chocolate truffles – and the ubiquitous but nevertheless yummy hot cross bun (with a difference!) And here below is the recipe… happy holidays and see you next term! Melissa

APRICOT & CARDAMOM HOT CROSS BUNS – Jeremy & Jane Strode

Ingredients:

  • 20g dried yeast
  • 100g caster sugar plus a pinch
  • 100g butter
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • ½ teaspoon ground cardamom
  • 500g plain flour
  • 2 eggs
  • 200g apricots
  • 90g self-raising flour
  • 10g skim milk powder
  • Butter & jam to serve

Glaze

  • 1/3 cup water
  • 2 tablespoons caster sugar

What to do:

  • Mix yeast with 200ml warm water & pinch of sugar in a small bowl and leave in a warm place for 5 minutes to activate.
  • Chop the apricots.
  • Place butter, salt, cardamom, plain flour and remaining sugar in the mixer and combine.
  • Add eggs and activated yeast and beat until smooth.
  • Add apricots and when combined, leave in a warm place for 1 to 1½ hours to double in size.

Start of lesson:

  • Line a large baking tray with non-stick baking paper. Punch dough down to its original size. Knead on a lightly floured surface until smooth. Divide into 12 even portions. Shape each portion into a ball. Place balls onto lined tray, about 1cm apart. Cover with plastic wrap. Set aside in a warm, draught-free place for 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 190°C.
  • Mix self-raising flour, milk powder and 100ml water together in a small bowl until smooth. Spoon into a small snap-lock bag. Snip off a tiny hole in 1 corner of bag. Pipe flour paste over tops of buns to form crosses. Bake for 20 minutes until buns are cooked through.
  • Make glaze: Place 1/3 cup water and sugar into a small saucepan over low heat. Stir until sugar dissolves. Bring to the boil. Boil for 5 minutes. Brush warm glaze over warm hot cross buns. Divide among serving plates & serve warm with butter & jam.

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March 22nd 2012

Well hello there! Harmony Day in the Cottage kicked off this week with a recipe for Harmony Carrots – our freshly dug carrots roasted with a little honey, olive oil and thyme… we’ve also been harvesting parsley, basil, mint, cucumber and tomato for the Quinoa Tabbouleh; still pounding basil for our warm salad of Roasted Pumpkin with Pesto & Goats’ Cheese; flexing our muscles for the Pizza with Radicchio & Thyme; and squishing into long, thin worms the Rosemary & Thyme Grissini to dip into Roasted Eggplant Relish… so as you can see we’ve been working the students – and volunteers as well!

Last week saw the children rolling pasta too and we have here some lovely shots of the classes – truly awe-inspiring work from our dedicated cooks… it really amazes me that time and time again the children put up fabulous dishes that are delicious and creative and also find time to pack away and help clear! I can’t believe sometimes that we manage to achieve what we do in the time that we have… Also illustrated here are the empty bowls of Radicchio, Gorgonzola & Pine Mushroom salad that got gobbled up in no time – truly grown up flavours?

And we’ve had even more new volunteers come to support us – I can’t stress enough how valued you all are & how the program benefits so much from your presence… thank you! And to all those considering coming along… yes, it can be daunting and chaotic at times (!), but is so much fun, AND you get to eat together at the end! And I’ve not yet had a group NOT put a delicious bowl or plate of something fab up yet.

And with that, hope to see you soon… Melissa

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March 7th 2012

Autumn – bang! And it’s here – the definite chilly mornings & nights, and crazy weather patterns of rain, rain, floods and more rain… and all the banging and thudding going on in the street outside makes me glad to be huddled inside the cottage with the ovens on, throwing pizza dough!

We’ve had such a great response from the wonderful volunteers so far this term – both connected to the school and also from the wider community – and so we’ve been able to make loads of delicious dishes with the children, and in smaller manageable groups. They love being with their mum, dad, gran, auntie, next door neighbour, best friend’s mum etc in the class, and amazingly, even cheeky behaviour suddenly seems to stop! And the mums themselves have been shocked to find that their allergic-to-vegetables child is wolfing down the autumn salad and the eggplant dip!

With loads of requests from the students to pair the pesto with some pasta I felt compelled to dust the pasta machines off & we’ve been rolling, rolling, rolling this week in one group, whilst another pounds the pine nuts, parmesan, garlic and basil for the pesto; we’ve been baking the little Lebanese eggplants and parsley to make a spicy & garlicky dip and then using our knife skills to create beautiful and neat crudités with which to dip; the potatoes that we pulled up at the beginning of the term have been put to use on our crispy potato & rosemary pizza with landcress and wild rocket; and our now Autumn salad has been garnished with the last of the cucumbers, crunchy dwarf beans and the addition of brilliant-yoked (boiled) eggs the chooks are providing now that they are laying! They must be very happy in their new palace… Alas for them though the children eat pretty much everything on their plates!

So thank you to all the lovely students, let’s hope the rest of the year is as dynamic and inspiring! And thanks too for all the superb volunteers who are giving up their time to make our Kitchen Garden classes such a success in 2012! I look forward to seeing you all soon,

Yum! Melissa

PS I’ll have the coffee on in the cottage by 9.30 (at the latest…!) on Saturday if you’re dropping in to help with the garden working bee… and might even rustle up some banana cake too 😉

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February 23rd 2012

First kitchen news of the year and it’s already week 5, ooh la la!

Talking of which, we celebrated le jour de crepes on Tuesday here in the cottage with 5/6P & flipped up a revolution with spinach & goats’ cheese pancakes with ratatouille and pikelets with lemongrass syrup and vanilla mascarpone – served up with our ever-morphing salad, now with green beans, bush tomatoes, nasturtiums & tarragon vinaigrette…

I’m also continuing  my introductory talks with the children, recapping on safety issues and expectations of being in the kitchen and what I can promise for the year… those classes have been heavy on discussion (with plenty of arms raise for comment!) but we’ve managed to fit in some fun cooking at the end too – pounding loads of basil to make pesto; rolling out rosemary flatbreads to cook off in the pan; infusing vegetable oil with garden herbs to pop corn in (and exploding out like a never-ending  volcano in Ms Hamblin’s class 3E!); squeezing garlic & juicing lemons to wilt with spinach… lots of great cooking noises & ending in delicious dishes that we’ve all loved!

And I must say huge congratulations to all the students in classes 3E & 3H for gaining their Knife Licences! Each student demonstrated how to pick up & hold a big Santoku knife & show how to do the ‘Bear Paw’ (raaaahhhhh) and then pick and up and hold a small Paring knife and slice gently through a (very squashy) bush tomato without all the seeds oozing out. They all passed with flying colours with each student being awarded their own named licence – and will able to experience even more with each recipe from now on.

So all in all, lovely work these last weeks, and with the dappled sun shining through the trees and the birds singing their song, and the beautiful new deck and landscaping looking like they’ve always been here, life down here in the cottage is good! A big thanks to all the huge amounts of volunteers that have turned out to support the kitchen & garden classes so far in 2012 – we are so impressed and hope that you enjoy your time here!

Bon appétit! And don’t forget to check out the recipes on bondikitchengarden.com

Melissa

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Sunday: cooking with four-year-old Ava

A cup of Earl Grey and an Anzac biscuit, perfect

It’s a beautiful sunny day out there but there’s a frrrrreezing cold wind… Steve has sneaked away for forty winks and Olly has finally gone down too. Ava not so! She’s bouncing off the walls after allowing me to while away some time on the laptop. Now she wants action! How to amuse her quietly and let the others have their siestas? Let’s bake biscuits!

Ava rolls Anzac biscuits

Whilst it’s not Anzac Day here (not even close – 25th April?) I never need an excuse to make Anzac biscuits. And un-Australian as it may be – apologies to those purists out there – we add some orange zest. Because we’ve some fantastic oranges in the fruit bowl and we feel like it.

Ava is funny, she keeps bending down to hide her head under the table: she’s sneaking bits of raw oat & flour mixture and doesn’t want me to see… I tell her that the more she leaves now, the more biscuits we get to eat later but I think she likes the game of subterfuge… She loves rolling the little spheres of goo in her hands and asks me every time if the ball’s the right size. She lines them up neatly to one side of the baking tray, all rubbing together, and doesn’t really understand that they’ll all spread. They’re all different sizes, but I tell her that’s ok: some will be chewy and some crispy, but all will be delicious!

The smell of the orange zest wafts out of the oven mingling with the toasty biscuit/ Golden Syrup yumminess, mmmmm.

Best thing about these bikkies? They only take 15 minutes or so to cook! Just enough time to clean up and pop the kettle on.

Anzac biscuits done!

Ava’s Orange Anzac Biscuits

 1 cup rolled oats

1 cup plain flour

1 cup raw sugar (or white, or half brown, half white)

¾ cup desiccated coconut

125g butter

2 tablespoons golden syrup

½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1 tablespoon boiling water

1 orange

 Preheat oven to 150°C.

 Combine oats, sifted flour, sugar and coconut in a large bowl. In a small saucepan, melt the butter and golden syrup over a gently heat. Mix the bicarb soda with boiling water, add to melted butter mixture and add this to the dry ingredients. Finely zest the orange and add the zest to the mixture. Stir until combined.

 Take a teaspoonful of mixture at a time and roll into small balls. Place these on a lightly greased oven tray and allow room to spread. Cook for about 15 -20 mins, until lovely and golden. Allow to cool on the trays and then eat!

Makes about 30. Try not to eat all in one setting like we did.

Proof of the Anzac is in the eating...

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Little cakes for our friends the fairies (and gnome)

What to do on a long weekend where there’s nothing but rain, rain, rain? My thoughts turn, as always, to food! With Ollsy asleep, we gave daddy a well-earned nap on the sofa watching sport on the telly & apron’d up in the kitchen for a little fairy cake escapade…

Fairy Cakes

 Ingredients
110g self-raising flour
110g butter, softened
110g caster sugar
50g sultanas
2 eggs, lightly beaten

 Method
Pre-heat oven to 180°C
Cream the butter and sugar until soft and light
Add the eggs a little at a time
Sift the flour and gently fold into the mixture
Fold in the sultanas
Place 24 paper baking cases into mini muffin trays & spoon in  the mixture
Bake for 12-15 minutes,  until well risen and golden brown
Eat in garden with fairies
Makes 24

A perfect public holiday Monday afternoon: Steve & Olly woke to a house of yummy cake smells & Ava got to do some important mixing & spooning, licking the bowl and even to do some washing up –  me, I bit my lip and ignored the floods of soapy water cascading onto the kitchen floor…

Such delicious little morsels! They almost made up for the lost playground opportunities over the three days with the early spring downpours – a great thing for the garden as all the green stuff has EXPLODED! I’ve got some lovely photos for my next post –  in the meantime, as they say: the proof is in the pudding, hmm-mm!

So, with that the weekend was over and it was time to think about finishing our little holiday – back to work, school and the week ahead with all its stresses and worries. Well, maybe after just one more tasty little morsel? And still enough cakes left to hide one in the garden for our little friends…

…and one last thing!

Good old Collingwood forever!
We know how to play the game
Side by side we stick together
To uphold the Magpies name
Hear the barrackers are shouting,
As all barrackers should!
All the Premierships a cake-walk
For the good old Collingwood!

Congratulations to the fearsome Magpies, winners of this year’s AFL Grand Final

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Have the cats got Olly’s tongue?

Our little Ollsy turns 18 months tomorrow, already… how amazing that the times flies so quickly! It seems that the hours are excruciatingly long but the weeks fly by: I’m very conscious of trying not to wish this time away as I realise how precious it is but I think it’s automatic conditioning to want to get to the next stage with your babies, whether it be solid food, walking, potty training or talking…

Talking of talking, or not talking as the case may be – I’ve been so enjoying Olly’s silence up til now that I haven’t even thought about his ‘next stage’… Ava, bless her darling heart, is a whirlwind of noise and motion and the two days a week she is at school have been our little oasis in a desert of maelstrom. It’s only in the last week I’ve thought about Olly talking and realised that he really should have been saying a few words by now, especially as his little buddy William has been galloping ahead in the verbal stakes!

So off we went to the audiology clinic at the Children’s Hospital and we had a fun half hour testing Olly’s aural reflexes, to be told his hearing is within the normal range and perhaps he has fluid behind the eardrums and to check it out with the doctor. Or perhaps our wee man is just a tiny bit lazy?! Why bother making the effort for all those separate words when a “uhh?!” will do for absolutely everything?

Let’s see what the next month brings – walking didn’t happen until he was almost 16 months, and at the moment he probably doesn’t feel the need to compete with the cacophony: Ava, the radio, the iPod, me shouting etc. Maybe this weekend we’ll turn it all off and see what happens…

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Broad beans and blood oranges

blood orange

Image by sweetbeetandgreenbean via Flickr

Yum yum, spring has sprung and we’ve taken full advantage of the delicious seasonal goodies of blood oranges & broad beans: we splashed out on a bottle of Campari to have with freshly squeezed blood orange juice at our regular long Sunday lunch with the delicious Kerry & Rod last week & followed drinks with broad bean & pecorino bruschetta and Spanish jamon…

Campari used to be my drink of choice a few moons ago, when I lived and drank in Melbourne as a young single thing – and when I had the energy to demand the proper measure (45mls) of the various bars if poured incorrectly – and drinking it the other day after ten years’ absence brought back many late night Negroni memories. Aaah, misspent youth!

Also, I found a lovely recipe for broad beans from Stephanie Alexander, so I set up my able sous chef Ava to podding:

We steamed the beans for 3 minutes, then re-podded to get the smaller, softer beans inside and smashed them straight away with the mortar & pestle. Then added a little salt & pepper, some grated pecorino and a glug of olive oil, stirred again and then served in a bowl to spread on yummy BBQ’d Brasserie Bread’s quinoa & soy sourdough, with a little garlic rubbed on. Just so delicious draped with a slither of jamon, am hungry just thinking about it now…

Pity Ava didn’t get in to the final product… those sneaky green vegetables!

PS. Soundtrack to this week’s cooking:
Smiley Culture – Shan-a-Shan http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC-yMtPDsAw
Jurassic 5 -Hey (instrumental) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjNjZq7_TAU
The Headhunters – If You’ve Got It, You’ll Get It http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0JedCdsWSo
Mayer Hawthorne – Maybe So Maybe No http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpfcydeSGeo (still…!)

Categories: Family, Food, Music | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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