British Food Fortnight Smoothies

We were very busy last week, out collecting ingredients for our smoothie to enter into the British Food Fortnight competition and trying out different recipes.

On Tuesday a group of children went out blackberry picking

When they got back to nursery they added them to the other ingredients and the children of all ages got involved in creating our first smoothie.

It tasted great, but wasn't quite right!

So on our walk on Wednesday we went in search of other ingredients. In the orchard leading up to nursery we picked some pears.

These children carried on on their walk so didn't have time to make a smoothie, but thier friends used the pears and the remaining blackberries in our second try on Thursday.

We're not quite sure if we have perfected our recipe, so we have been to collect more blackberries to keep trying, which will mean more tasting!!!

Monday 20th Sept - British Food Fortnight - Vegetable Soup

On Monday a group of children walked to the Court's kitchen garden where they met up with the gardeners and went round to choose vegetables to make soup for tea. After a good look round they came back with a basket full of carrots, butternut squash, onions, leeks and potatoes.

Back at Grasshoppers the older nursery children cut up some of the vegetables, leaving the butternut squash , which was a bit harder, for the After school club children to prepare to make soup.

The children ate the soup for tea and it was delicious, so good that one of the team made it at home, but she said that hers wasn't quite as good , but then her veg were from the supermarket not straight out of the garden!!

Why not make some for yourself, here is what we did;

Carrot and butternut squash soup with honey

Ingredients

1oz butter

1 onion (peeled and chopped)
1 garlic clove (peeled and crushed)
6 carrots (peeled and chopped)
1 medium butternut squash (peeled, chopped and deseeded)

1 litre vegetable stock

1 crusty white roll

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp runny honey

1. Melt the butter in a saucepan on low heat, add the onion, garlic and carrot and cook for five minutes, until the onion is soft.
2. Add the potato and cook for a few more minutes.
3. Add the butternut squash and cook for a few more minutes.
4. Pour over the stock and bring to the boil, then simmer for twenty-five minutes.
5. Take off the heat, allow to cool puree using a blender
6. Cut the bread roll in half, cut each half into cubes, drizzle honey and olive oil over the cubes.
7. Bake in the oven until crispy.

We hope that you have access to fresh vegetable too so that you can taste it at its best!

Look what else we've grown!

Over the Summer, we grew a row of sunflowers.

We have watered them and watched them grow very closely - one of them had more than one flower!

After he went along the line carefully counting the flowers, one of the children suggested we number them. Doing just that has opened up all sorts of other opportunities for maths; comparing them and guessing which would grow the tallest.

They have finished flowering now, so we are drying out the flowerheads to plant some of the seeds next year and to feed the birds through the winter.

We also planted some gerberas in wellington boots to brighten up the entrance. We have looed after them and learned what our flowers needed to grow. The gerberas have also reached the end of their growing season, but as we got so many comments about our lovely wellies we are going to replant them, they may become a seaonal feature!

Celebrating British Food Fortnight - 18th September - 3rd October

At Grasshoppers we have lots of plans for Britsh Food Fortnight.

We have been growing our own vegetables, salad and herbs and we are going to be using them in our baking this week.
We are also going to be collecting veg from the Court garden and picking fruit from orchards in the village.

We have plans to enter a smoothie in the national competition - but our ideas and recipe are top secret!!

We hope to use some flour made from wheat harvested from Overbury Farm in our messy play activities and our stories and songs will be themed to help the children to learn more about where their food comes from.

We'd like to involve the families of the children in our activities, so if you have any fruit or vegetables that you have grown and would like to bring them in we'd love to use them in our activities.

Watch this space for photographs our British Food Fortnight fun!!

A Big Thank You!

We need to say a big thank you to all of you who religiously collected Sainsburys vouchers with your weekly shops. We have received our goodies and want to show you what fun the children are having with them.

We were able to get new resouces for both indoors and out.

We chose a breakfast and dinner set for our home corner as imaginative role play is such a firm favourite with all ages.

We also got some more gardening equipment to use in both the growing of our own vegetables and messy fun in the digging pit!!

Thanks again.