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...

 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...

Kitchen Garden Blog #5 - Potato Galette Potatoes are one of my favourite ingredients. So versatile. Used in so many different ways by different cultures from all over the world. I'm looking forward to introducing the KG crew to some Sichuan Potato Slivers soon. This time we kept it simple. Simple but superb. This is a dish that doesn't look out of place in top end restaurants. When it's well executed it's perfect, yet it only has 3 ingredients. Potatoes, butter and salt. What else does one need really?   The mandolin is, in my opinion, the most dangerous piece of equipment in a kitchen. So sharp and so easy to take off the tip of your finger. I always insist on people using the helpful, if a little cumbersome, attachment that mitigates the risk.  We talked about what butter consisted of and then clarified some, by heating it and removing the milk solids (the white frothy stuff that rises to the top when you heat butter). These have a tendency to burn and impart burnt fl...

  Kitchen Garden Blog #4 - Yummy Yummy Yummy I've got love in my tummy.  You  would be forgiven for wondering if Kitchen Garden was in fact just Garden if you've managed to read this far into these blog posts. But fear not, we Kitchen too.  Since our gardens are just getting established we've had limited things at our disposal to cook, but we are a resourceful bunch. Last year's sustainability crew under the watchful eye of Adrian Wood nurtured some garden beds at the school and produced some lovely produce which we've put to good use so far. The seasons have also been kind to us in the form of black berries and apples. So we haven't wanted for things to do in the kitchen.  We started the year by harvesting some spinach and silverbeet and incorporating these into pasta dough which we rolled out to make raviolo (large ravioli) and some fettuccine. We filled the raviolo with ricotta, feta, parmesan and more spinach. These got bathed in a browned butter, sage and a...

THE ALICE MILLER KITCHEN GARDEN  Blog #3: Hügelkultur Garden Beds  Our beds are full of sand. I suspect that once upon a time they were filled with a sandy loam mix from a garden supply shop and over the years any organic matter that was in that mix has long since gone and we're left wth very hydrophobic sand. It's great for drainage....that's about it. So we need to reintroduce organic matter into our beds. We're doing it in a number of ways. One strategy is creating Hugelkultur beds. This in an old German permaculture system whereby you fill the beds with logs, sticks, straw, cardboard, manure, compost...any biomass really and top it with soil/compost and let the natural processes break all of it down over a number of years. This system has a whole host of benefits. The bigger logs in the base of the bed serve as sponges. They absorb water in the wetter months and gradually release it as the soil dries out reducing the need for irrigation. They also become food for fu...