Eco-club Diary

Hi all,

in our last eco-club on Tuesday we sowed our sweetpea seeds in the toilet rolls.  We also sowed some basil seeds as we hope to grow some on our window sill for use in HE. 

We also had some visitors from Iraq last week in our school and we were delighted that they loved our garden.  We planted an oak tree to commemorate their visit.

Rachel and Ellen had brought in pumpkin soup recipes so we all looked at the two recipes and mixed them up a bit to suit what we thought would be nice.  The pumpkins will be ready by next week to harvest and we are going to make our spicy pumpkin soup in eco-club.

Here is our recipe below.

Spicy Roast Pumpkin Soup


Pumpkin could be substituted with Butternut squash

Ingredients:

4medium cloves garlic, unpeeled

1kg peeled, deseeded pumpkin

1 tablespoon oil

1 large onion, finely chopped

1 medium potato, peeled and cut into 2cm cubes

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1 teaspoon ground cumin

Pinch of chilli powder

Salt and pepper, to taste

1 litre vegetable or chicken stock

1-2tsp caster sugar (optional, depending on the sweetness of the pumpkin)

To serve:

Cream, for serving

Ground nutmeg, for serving



Method

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/ gas mark 6.

Chop pumpkin into even-sized pieces (larger pieces will require a longer roasting time). Place pumpkin and unpeeled garlic cloves in a baking tray/dish, drizzle with three teaspoons of the oil and toss to coat with oil. © exclusivelyf

Bake for 20 minutes, then remove the garlic so that it doesn't overcook. Continue baking pumpkin until tender and cooked through. Keep an eye on the pumpkin to ensure it doesn't burn.



Heat a teaspoon of oil in large saucepan over medium heat. Add onion, diced potato, nutmeg, cumin, chilli powder, salt and pepper. Cook, stirring, for one minute.



Add pumpkin and stock and bring to the boil. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, until onion and potatoes are soft and stock has reduced, about 20 minutes. The more the stock reduces, the thicker the soup will be.

Peel roasted garlic and add to saucepan. Add sugar if necessary.

Puree the soup using a blender.



Serve the soup hot. Top with a drizzle of cream and a sprinkle of nutmeg, if desired.

I will put some photos up on Tuesday when we cook it next week.  If you make it why not post a comment and let us know if it is nice.Will update next week.

Eco-Club Thursday this week due to teacher training.

Useful web-link for sweet-pea sowing in October.

http://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/projects/sweet-pea-sowing/

We plan to sow ours in the toilet roll holders - even though it recommends the commercial root trainers.  We are keen to keep costs down and recycle as much as possible so the toilet rolls will be the method we use.

Impact 2010 Awards - Waterfront Hall

We had a great day out to the awards ceremony in The Waterfront Hall in Belfast on 6th October.  Unfortunately we did not win but we came back full of ideas and enthusiasm to make our project a winner in the future.

We met lots of other schools and we made links with schools that were doing similar things.  All the pupils were keen to enter the Eco-Unesco Competion and this will be our next big target.

A great day had by all and we hope to have many more like this - only we hope to win the next time!

Eco-Club Tuesday 5th October

Hi all,

another busy day at eco - club.  Some weeding started but the heavens opened shortly after so we ended up getting more bottles ready for our eco-greenhouse.  We are well on our way to getting our greenhouse completed.

This is some of us in the garden before the rain.


Weeding the potato beds - we even found more spuds!



Pumpkins

Girls proud of their superb weeding!

A lonely cabbage - unfortunately the caterpillers had a field day with most of our cabbages.