Alice Miller Kitchen Garden Blog

  Kitchen Garden Blog #11: Now we're cooking....with fire. November is a busy time for the Macedon Ranges gardener. That old adage that you wait until Melbourne Cup Day to plant your tomatoes might not be true for Melbourne, but it's definitely true up here. Late frosts can wipe out your hard work if you go too early. A lesson hard learned. November is also a busy time for Year 12 students who are sitting their exams. Here at Alice Miller, the exams are run in the house which   is located directly next to our veggie gardens. So for the last few weeks and for the next few also, we've relocated our programme in order to keep the peace over there for the studious Year 12s.  That's not to say we haven't been busy. We have been planting in our garden when there are no exams on, so we've got lots of stuff ready to produce bountiful summer harvests for us. We've also restored the OTHER chicken run and coup and relocated our ladies in there for a little holiday and ...

  Kitchen Garden Blog #10: The Cinnamon Scroll This semester has started well. We're starting to see some growth in our leafy greens as the days get longer. We've been getting busy filling the greenhouse with seed trays etc and we're just about finished rejuvenating all of the beds in readiness for spring planting. We've been busy in the kitchen too. We made a lovely spanish tortilla with some silverbeet from the garden (our first harvest) which was enjoyed by all. There's always a hairy moment when the thing is flipped out of the pan, but, you'll be pleased to know that it went swimmingly.  More recently, and after a request from the crew to do something a little on the sweeter side of life, we had a go at making cinnamon scrolls. We talked a little about the roll of yeast in bread and how it creates carbon dioxide which causes things to rise. In order for yeast to perform this little feat of culinary magic, it needs some time in the right conditions. Warmth is...

 Kitchen Garden Blog #9: Camp Fire Cooking Sometimes when you have a Kitchen Garden double, and you spend the first half working hard in the garden on a cold day, it's nice to treat yourself in the second half. On this particular day, we got a little fire going while discussing teepee vs log cabin fire building methods. Personally, I used to be a teepee guy, but more recently i've converted to the log cabin stacking method. What ever floats your boat and cooks your food and keeps you warm I guess. We made some damper sticks with milk and self raising flour and cooked them slowly over the coals and then filled them with butter and either golden syrup or black berry jam from the summer's black berry harvest. There's something about people sitting around a fire cooking food. It makes you slow down and the conversation flows. Good times.  John & The KG Crew. 

 Kitchen Garden Blog #8: nets and compost We've been working hard to create great soil for growing in. One of our methods has been creating huegel culture beds (detailed in a previous blog post - #3). This involves using wood as a base layer for the beds where they invite fungi into the beds to break them down, providing the soil with nutrients and water retaining properties for years to come. In order to get enough wood for the task, we formed a human chain from the wood pile to the car boot. Then at the beds we did similar, from the car boot to the garden beds. It worked pretty well.  We've also been working on our composting systems at the school. All organic waste now goes into wheelie bins which can be taken over to the house and composted. We've set up a (currently) two bay pallet compost system, as well as our conventional bin, a worm farm and, since autumn, a caged leaf mulch pile.  We've also done some composting in situ. This is a great option if you have limi...

Kitchen Garden Blog #7: Sichuan Cookery In "the west" our standard way of talking about flavours involves 5 things. Sweet, Sour, Bitter, Salty & Umami (savoury). In the province of Sichuan in western China they identify 23 distinct flavours. There's a saying, "go to China for food, go to Sichuan for flavour." I've loved Sichuan food since Dainty Sichuan first opened its doors in a small, 8 tabled shop on Smith St back in 2003. Then, Sichuan food was relatively unknown in Australia. Since then it has grown to become a dominant theme in food culture. Hot pots are often at the forefront of people's minds, yet many of their single dishes are sublime. In Kitchen Garden we used some school grown potatoes and my home grown beans and eggplants to create three of my favourite Sichuan dishes.  For these dishes we used Fuchsia Dunlop's seminal book, Sichuan Cookery. We made potato threads, dry fried green beans and fish fragrant eggplant. Watching Year 7...

 Kitchen Garden Blog #6 - How many people does it take to build a greenhouse? Seeds like particular conditions to germinate. To make it more complicated, not all of them like the same conditions. Some seeds won't germinate unless exposed to smoke so that they can regenerate after a fire (many eucalyptus varieties). Some need extended periods of cold temperature to emulate a long winter (apple seeds). Some need to be roughed up a little to mimic the forces of nature, this is called scarifying (sweet peas/lupins). Other's even need to pass through the digestive tracks of animals in order to germinate properly  There are ways to artificially recreate these conditions to get germination happening - for example I stored some apple seeds in a fridge for 4 months before germinating, and they popped up beautifully. You can generally think about fruits as a container for seeds designed to preserve the seed for the right amount of time, and in the right way for the seeds to successfully...