The kitchen is happily abuzz with Christmas parties, team building sessions, board meetings and birthday parties, and it is wonderful to see the kitchen working so well for such a variety of different uses. This term’s classes have been a lot of fun, with people really enjoying the experience of cooking together, experimenting with new dishes, and sitting down at the end to enjoy what they have created. The tapas and French cooking classes have been especially popular and wonderfully social occasions.

It was a real highlight to be invited to do a demonstration at the A&P show in October. Since then we have been invited to participate in the NZ Edible Garden Show to be held at the Hawke’s Bay A&P Show Grounds in February, where Pauline will be demonstrating the versatility of the humble zucchini.

Our children’s Christmas holiday baking classes are filling up quickly, and we are putting together a selection of exciting classes for the new year.

A Farmhouse Kitchen gift voucher is the perfect gift for Christmas or any other occasion. A cooking class is a great opportunity to learn new skills, make new friends, and have a lot of fun.

We offer $60 or $90 gift vouchers, which can be used for any of our cooking classes. Buy your voucher today and we will send it to you with a flyer offering more information about the cooking school and our classes.

--> Buy a gift voucher

Our French cooking and tapas classes will be back by popular demand, as well as our lacto-fermented vegetable classes, where we will be using ingredients from the garden, now abundant with fresh produce.

Cheese making with Inacio Guimares from Hohepa Hawke’s Bay – you will learn how to make fresh cheeses like mozzarella, feta, quark and haloumi with organic milk and quality Hawke’s Bay ingredients.

Game workshops with Andy Glover from Tuki Kitchen – you will learn the best ways to cook duck, pheasant, rabbit, hare, venison, and if you are lucky, maybe even wild boar.

Pasta workshops with Danny Brown from Danny’s Pasta – you will learn how to make fresh fettucini, orichietti and tortellini, and yummy sauces to accompany them.

For more information about our classes and bookings click here

At Farmhouse Kitchen we use fresh vegetables, fruits and herbs all the time, and not one scrap of them is wasted. All of our kitchen waste is converted into beautiful compost for the garden by our low-maintenance pets - worms. The worms in our worm farm aren’t fussy, they will chomp through anything from vegetable and kitchen scraps, vacuum cleaner dust, coffee grounds and even shredded newspaper, turning it all into rich, odour-free compost (vermicasts) and buckets of black liquid, which we then use to feed our vegetable plants. It’s a good deal for all involved!

If you haven’t already got a worm farm of your own, we would greatly recommend having a go at making one. The beauty of a worm farm is that you can keep it anywhere – in the garage, on a patio, or in an unused corner of the garden.

Worm farms are a great project for kids to be part of, they love watching worms at work, and worm farming gives them a real practical look at the benefits of recycling.

You can buy ready made worm farms from garden centres or hardware stores, with easy to follow instructions, or you could even make one yourself 

More info...

Makes 1 big one 23 cm diameter, or 6 individual cake dishes.

Base:
1/4 cup softened butter
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablepoons cold water

Cream butter and sugar, add vanilla.
Sift the flour and the baking powder.
Combine the flour into the butter mixture.
Add water as needed to make a smooth dough, do not knead too much.
Put in fridge to rest and cool down.
Grease a cake tin with butter and dust with flour.
Press dough into bake tin, spreading the dough along the bottom and up the sides.
Press holes with a fork into the bottom.
Place in fridge while preparing topping.

Preheat the oven at 170 degrees celsius.

Filling:
500 gram quark
¾ cup sugar
2 - 3  eggs
lemon rind of half a lemon

Beat the quark and sugar until soft and fluffy.
Add the eggs one at a time, and then add the lemon rind.
Pour the mixture into the cake tin on top of the dough.

Bake at 170°C for 45-55 minutes, until centre is firm, taking care not to brown the top too much.
Leave in the oven to cool.

Refrigerate until ready to serve.

Topping:

1 punnet of strawberries                                                                      fresh borage flowers

Slice the strawberries and put in the centre of the cake, sprinkle over the borage flowers, ready to serve.

Optional:

Make a raspberry sauce from frozen raspberries, some sugar and lemon juice and zest to pour over the cheese cake.

Dust with dehydrated raspberry powder.

Use different fruits, or a mixture, blueberries, boysenberries, etc....

and we look forward to seeing you in the new year at Farmhouse Kitchen.

Pauline Korevaar and Chris van der Have.