Menu: School grow classes could add up to great prizes
Junior Infants pupils, Muireann Cooke, Odhran Rellis, Eve Power and Lucy Hayes, from Faithlegg National School, Co. Waterford, looking forward to taking part in The Big Grow 2022, a schools veg growing programme from GIY and innocent drinks. Picture: Patrick Browne
Big Grow 2022 sees the return of GIY’s enormously popular schools programme to get 50,000 children growing their own veg at school and supplying the wherewithal to kickstart the whole process as they team up once more with innocent drinks to supply free growing kits for classes nationwide.
Primary school teachers nationwide can now sign up for a free food growing kit for their students which comes with three packs of different seeds including mixed salad, peas, and radish along with enough compost, growing cups, instructions, and fun lesson plans for the entire class.
Now in its eleventh year, The Big Grow has so far helped 1.6m children to start growing their own veg.
It provides a valuable life skill and an appreciation for real food and where it comes from and participating schools and pupils will be encouraged to share their growing experiences online in order to be in with a chance of being crowned The Big Grow Champions of 2022 with a fantastic prize of a school garden revamp.
Two-teacher Carriganima NS, in Co Cork, won in 2021. Teacher, Lavinia Sheahan, said: “2021 wasn’t the easiest year for children at school so this outdoor activity offered us a wonderful slice of normality and learning in a fun way together.”
Teachers will also be provided with a resource pack to assist them in guiding their budding growers through the process with lesson plans, growing activities, growth charts, quizzes and more. Registration is open while stocks last, and kits will be delivered to schools in the first week of March 2022.
The Menu is a great believer that breakfast is the most important meal of the day — along with lunch and dinner — and he also highly rates supper and any snacks that may fall in between the cracks of those aforementioned.
But getting back to breakfast, gift hampers from The Merry Mill in Co Laois are right up The Menu’s street — and will be especially appealing to those with dietary issues around gluten.
The Organic Artisan Gift Hamper contains their own organic gluten-free porridge, with oats they grow and mill themselves, organic gluten-free pancake mix, organic ground coffee, roasted by Seccoto Coffee in Laois, and a hand-painted card.
The bigger and bolder organic Breakfast Hamper includes the above and is further supplemented with more from the GF range: overnight oats, pancake flour, and oat flour; as well as organic chia, flax and sunflower seeds.
The Menu sends out ‘birthday’ wishes to the very wonderful Mary Pawle and her equally wonderful husband Ivan.
Their wine importing business, Mary Pawle Wines, in Kerry — the first to import organic wines to Ireland — is now 25 years old and entirely deserving of your online attentions to purchase something splendid to fill your glass.
One fine recent morning, The Menu struck out for West Cork. Nothing would do him but to break his fast at the new Wildflour bakery emporium in Innishannon.
Having bought up half the shop, he then repaired to a bench outside on the fine wide pavement bearing a row of pollarded trees parading down the street.
Were it not for the endless scrum of traffic — a blight on the otherwise lovely village — The Menu fancied he might well have been seated outside some continental cafe.
Wildflour is the bricks and mortar home of erstwhile baker Chris Fahy, who began baking his fine breads from a borrowed portable woodfired oven in the summer of 2020 and then opened his first outlet in September of last year.
The locals have taken this new arrival to heart with enormous enthusiasm. Hardly surprising when you consider the quality of the real handmade breads, which The Menu has featured before, all containing nothing but flour, water, salt and a sufficiency of time to properly ferment, ensuring maximum nutritional bioavailability of delicious breads with a minimum of impact on the digestive system.
In addition, Chris turns out a fine line of savoury and sweet patisserie and Viennoiserie. And The Menu filled his boots with super sausage rolls, cracking croissants, a fabulous focaccia ham sandwich, and the aforementioned and quite delicious cinnamon twists.
Pride of place, however, went to Chris’ Heritage Loaf, made using heritage wheats, Olands and Purple, entirely grown and milled into flour in Kilkenny by the Little Mill company.
The dark, burnished brown crust has a fine craggy chew encasing a springy crumb that is sublimely textured and deeply flavoursome, nutty, with a faint undertow of malty sweetness and a gentle tart coda at the finish. It makes a very fine base for all manner of super sandwiches but The Menu enjoyed it best of all next morning toasted and spread with far too much melting Cuinneog Country Butter, washed down with a bracing pot of loose leaf tea.
