Alice Miller Kitchen Garden Blog

 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...