Healthy Darwin is a program run through Darwin City Council and right now I am coordinating the kitchen and garden program. This runs for a couple of hours on a Wednesday for 6 weeks and covers the very basics of growing food plants and cooking local produce. The sessions alternate cooking one week, gardening the next. The sessions this time are in the Alawa area and we hold them at Lakeside Drive Community Garden (LDCG) and Alawa Primary School Kitchen and Garden.

We made a raised garden bed from recycled materials at LDCG, which is now ready for planting. In our kitchen session we stir fried local greens including Kang Kong and snake gourd and made banana flower salad and local Thai style fishcakes! Check out the recipes section for these recipes. Looking forward to planting out our bed this week and planning a planting calendar for the dry season. The next recipes are requests of participants combined with some of my own ideas of how to cook certain local produce and they involve some Jack fruit curry, Javanese and other styles of eggplants, rice paper rolls, noodle salads, roasted green pawpaw and more- I can’t wait!