Wow- what a month and more, the Community Village at the Tropical Garden Spectacular was yet again amazing. We hosted even more cooking and gardening workshops and had an even busier cafe. The cafe, including the GULP tasting plates raised over $4000 for local community gardens, including Lakeside Drive, The Snake Beaners and the Mulch Pit! We had some inspiring  cooking demos from local home cooks and a guest appearance from Selvam who is one of the only Darwin Restaurants to always have local veggies in his menu! He also added a great pumpkin and coconut curry to our tasting platters.

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I would love to give a big public shout out, to thank all our amazing volunteers in the whole area, in the cafe, those donating cakes and cafe yummies, time and awesome original dishes and recipes to GULP TASTING PLATTERS. We had so many delicous dishes donated to our platter releases, that sent people away inspired to use more local produce.  I thought I would list them-

• Zucchini savory crepes with local eggs, Creme Fraiche and sun dried tomatoes
• Pawpaw, cucumber and mint and lime salad
• Smoked local mackerel with amazing home made mayonnaise with home grown eggs
• Brazilian spinach mini frittatas
• Home made Kale chips
• Roasted Jack fruit seeds
• Fresh garden greens and herbs as garnish/ sides
• Jackfruit curry
• South Indian Pumpkin and coconut curry
• Okra gumbo/ curry
• Local fish herby spiced fish cakes
• Pumpkin dip and home made crackers
• Baba ganoush and homemade crackers
• Gluten free pumpkin pikelets
• Raw pumpkin and lime salad
• Thai style snake bean extravaganza with home squished coconut milk
• Territory delight (with cassava)
• Cassava and sweet sweet potato pone
• Spicy beautiful eggplant and tomato Nia dish
• Arafura eggplant
• Javanese eggplant
• Roasted green papaw
• Pawpaw and lime with balsamic oil
• Watermelon salad
• Bitter-melon and tofu delight
• Local green and pumpkin frittata
• Moringa bites

I had some great helpers too! I would also like to thank NT Farmers for providing some of the ingredients for our cooking demos and Scott from The Horticulture Dep at CDU for allowing us to pick his amazing citrus (an article on this coming soon). I am slowly uploading the wonderful recipes from these platters- so go to “Recipes” and check it out. Once again inspirational- sharing how great it is to be growing community, growing food and of course cooking it into to delicious dishes to share!

I have only just got around to writing this, due to all the fabulous community food and gardening stuff happening. We had the most amazing turn out at Lakeside community garden garden grooves and solar film night, showing “Edible City” as part of the Transition film festival- over 250 people in the garden, the most yet! So inspiring on so many levels. You can watch it online- but that just isn’t the same as under the stars in the garden on solar powered cinema…click here- Edible City the movie

We also had the ‘Solar summit’ last week- very interesting, about the challenges of NT becoming a solar hub.  I even managed to cram in a couple of other Transition films and a bush trip- you can’t loose touch with the landscape!

Tonight I just finished the last of our 6 week workshops- ‘Cooking and Gardening in the Tropics’ with some fab and much enjoyed recipes with our great participants!..So more stories and  photos to follow on all this. Wow it has been a busy week, month, year!