Cooking up a Summer Camp from Dirt to Dinner

Our Dirt to Dinner Campers--2013

How does dinner come from dirt? After a week of cooking delicious meals in the IslandWood garden, our summer campers can definitely answer that question.

Making fresh tomato sauce in the outdoor kitchen

Our 5th and 6th graders donned both chef hats and garden gloves this week as they explored the idea of "dirt to dinner".  Working with the IslandWood chefs, they chopped, stirred, mashed and whisked garden ingredients into gourmet meals.  They also helped to take care of the IslandWood garden.  They watered and weeded our garden--the source of much of their food for the week--and they also planted new seeds so we can continue to produce food through the fall and into the winter.

Chocolate-mint canolli--yum!

Since we harvested many ingredients from the garden, it was easy to see that good meals can come from dirt!

Campers relaxing in the shade of the Sunflower allee!

Our menu for the week was based on the theme of meals from "Around the World":

Monday:  Italy --Pizza with fresh garden sauce, Caprese salad and Cannoli for dessert
Tuesday:  Japan-- Sushi, Yakisoba noodles with veggies, Cucumber salad and Green Tea ice cream
Wednesday: Greek-- Roasted Chicken Gyros with fresh tzatziki sauce, Greek Salad, Tabbouleh salad and roasted plums with yoghurt and mint for dessert
Thursday: Bainbridge Farm -- Egg and Veggie Frittata, Garden Salad with homemade ranch dressing and Fresh Fruit Crisp for dessert
Friday: Mexico -- Shredded Chicken Burritos with Rice and Beans, Homemade Salsa and Tres de Leche for dessert

Beautiful homemade sushi

Learning how to whisk ingredients together

Having fun with Chef Morgan

Cheers to a delicious week of homemade, garden-grown dinners from around the world!!

Cooking up some Summer Camps with our Nature Chefs!

This past week, the IslandWood garden hosted some very enthusiastic (and hungry!) nature chefs. They harvested food from the garden and the woods, they cooked with the chefs and they ate delicious garden meals.

One of our goals for the week was to teach our young chefs that food comes from the garden.  And our kiddos learned that lesson very quickly. On the second day of camp, one young chef came running into the garden saying, "I'm sooo hungry!  Can you please take me to the kale?" That is music to any gardener's ears.

Our campers thoroughly enjoyed playing in the garden. Parachute men were made out of not-quite-ready tomatillos and snap dragon blossoms became dragon puppets, ready to eat someone's nose!

And of course they ate and ate. By the end of the week it looked as though a herd of deer had nibbled and munched their way through the garden. 

Chef John and Chef Morgan created an outdoor kitchen in the garden.  Here our young chefs created delicious garden meals, and learned some cooking skills.

Our Menu for the Week

Monday: Pizza with fresh, homemade pizza sauce, and Garden Salad

Edible garden flowers were added to the salad--Beautiful!

Tuesday: Kale biscuits baked in the cob oven, butter (shaken by the campers) and freshly made woodland berry jam

Shaking the cream into butter...a task that takes many hands.

Using the food mill to make the jam.

Wednesday: Garden Spring rolls

Looking for veggies for the spring rolls and checking on the Sun Tea

An enormous red beet!

Thursday: Potato Gnocchi with potatoes harvested from the garden and freshly made sauce.  Berry popsicles for dessert!

The sauce was so yummy, our campers needed to eat every last drop!

Collecting fruit for the popsicles...

Finding wild strawberries!

A container filled with wild strawberries, huckleberries, salal berries and trailing blackberries.

Friday: Fruit Crisps baked in the cob oven

Yum!!

Our Banana plant, spending the summer out of the greenhouse, sported our Nature Chef's hats on the last day!

Thank you Nature Chefs for a very fun week. Keep on cooking!

Nature Chefs, Summer 2013

What's growing in the garden?

Team Wave wearing stylish and edible pea hats!!

Everything is growing in our IslandWood garden--including the children!  Team Wave from Sheridan Elementary School in Tacoma, Washington, enjoyed sampling garden veggies, wearing garden veggies and planting garden veggies.  A fun, full morning in the garden.

This past Spring our SOP students have been helping us plant seeds in the greenhouse.  Those seeds have grown into beautiful vegetable starts, which have all now been transplanted out into the garden.  The garden is looking so lovely and growing so rapidly, we just had to share a few pictures.

Here is a look at all things green and growing:

Scarlet runner beans climbing up sunflower stalks

Beautiful and interesting purple kohlrabi 

Red and green lettuces which have been tasted by both children and a few slugs...

Fresh garden broccoli tastes amazing!

Beautiful pea blossoms with pea pods coming soon

The kale have outdone themselves with huge tasty leaves!

The students have discovered that a drop of honey lives at the base of each Jerusalem Sage blossom--yum!

Here's to fresh and delicious garden food!

Heavenly Rhubarb Lemonade

Rhubarb lemonade was a huge hit with Team Rain from Salmon Bay Elementary!

Team Rain loved the rhubarb lemonade so much they nicknamed it "Rhub-ade". One team member remarked, "It wasn't rubade, it was heaven".  We agree!!

Rhubarb is a perennial vegetable that can be harvested in the spring and into the summer.
Just eat the stems, which are delicious in pies, cobblers and even lemonade! DON'T eat the leaves because they are poisonous. 

Rhubarb Lemonade
Combine in a saucepan:
2 to 4 cups chopped rhubarb stems (more rhubarb will make it more tart and colorful)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 Tablespoons grated lemon zest
1 cup water
Bring ingredients to a boil and let it simmer over medium-low heat for about ten minutes until the rhubarb is soft. 
Set it aside and let it cool.

Meanwhile, cut 6 to 8 lemons in half and juice them with a reamer.  You should try to get about 3/4 cup lemon juice.

Fill a pitcher with about 8 cups of water and ice.  Pour the rhubarb mixture into a sieve and use a wooden spoon to press out as much of the rhubarb liquid as possible into the water.  You'll be left with the lemon peel and some rhubarb goo in the sieve, which you can eat (the kids thought it was delicious) or compost.

Pour the lemon juice into the sieve above the pitcher to remove the seeds and press gently to get the juice from the pulp.  Stir well and give it a taste.  Does it need more juice?  More water?  More sugar (I doubt it!)?

Serve with a fresh mint leaf if you wish - Mmmmm!

Soil to Snack: Corn Biscuits

Warm May sunshine welcomed Team Forest, from Silver Ridge Elementary, into the IslandWood garden. Our Soil to Snack project was to make Corn Biscuits.  But not just any corn biscuits.  No, these were going to be truly Farm to Table, Slow Food biscuits.

What does Farm to Table and Slow Food mean?  For starters it means delicious, wholesome food, and I think Team Forest would agree as they devoured the biscuits!

We started with fresh local corn from Emily's farmer friends Aaron and Dana.  They farm Around the Table Farm in Poulsbo, WA using organic farming methods, companion planting and crop rotation.

Aaron

Dana

Not only was this corn grown with much love and care, but the soil it was planted in was tilled by two giant horses that belong to another local farmer, Betsy, from Laughing Crow Farm.  

Animal powered Farming!  Draft horses and sisters Abby and Red of Laughing Crow Farm

Beautifully colored corn, about to become corn flour!

Making the biscuits was a fun but slow process.  First the students took the corn kernels off the corn.

Olivia helping one of the students turn the mill wheel.

Next we used a grain mill to grind the corn into flour

The corn flour still has some of the beautiful colors

Jen helping the kids make the biscuit dough

We took the corn flour over to the cob oven in the garden, and started making biscuits.  The recipe calls for buttermilk, so instead of buying buttermilk, the kids made buttermilk!  All you need to make buttermilk is a carton of cream and lots of people willing to shake it.We put the buttermilk into a glass jar and took turns shaking it while we walked around the garden, and in no time we had both fresh butter and buttermilk.

The buttermilk was incorporated into the corn flour batter and the butter we saved for later...

The kids rolled out the biscuit dough--some in funny shapes!

And we put the trays into the cob oven and baked them using heat from a wood fire.

Nice hot coals to bake delicious biscuits

When the biscuits were golden colored and ready to eat, we took the butter we had saved from the buttermilk process and added some honey to it to make delicious honey-butter...Yum!

Fresh, local ingredients, grown and harvested with care, became the tastiest biscuits.  It was truly a delicious, Slow Food, Farm to Table day in the garden.

Here is the recipe:

Cornmeal Buttermilk Biscuits (makes 8 biscuits)
1 1/3 Cup flour
2/3 Cup polenta style cornmeal
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
6 Tbsp unsalted butter diced
3/4 Cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.  In a large bowl whisk flour, cornmeal, baking power, baking soda, sugar and salt.

Rub 2 Tablespoons butter into flour mixture with fingertips until incorporated.  Work remaining butter in until pea size.  Gently stir in buttermilk.

Roll dough out to 1/2 inch thickness, cut into desired shapes and bake for about 15 minutes.

Enjoy!!