Safari cooking success

Community Health-Works are a team of qualified nutritionists and yoga instructors who offer health and well-being coaching and support to those living on a tight budget or trying to cope with other difficult life circumstances. Sharing simple cooking skills and ideas about savvy meal planning and preparation, as well as how to eat more fresh foods is a great way to support our customers. In support of this, our customers have been offered a series of ‘cooking on a budget” sessions and yoga workshops.

Good food and good company also makes us feel good, and we seized the opportunity to work together offering customers fun, live cooking sessions both digitally through Zoom, and also in-person at some of our Retirement Living schemes. Live streaming took place from a few of our Retirement Living schemes and at some schemes, our Experience Tables provided a TV like experience, enabling customers to join from communal lounges.

During the sessions, customers were invited to take part, helping to prepare nutritionally balanced and cost-effective meals, and were encouraged to ask questions about diet or alternative recipe options. Lorraine from Health-Works explained the nutritional benefits of the meals and could offer advice to those with specific dietary requirements. Once cooked, a tasty lunch was served and enjoyed. A great time was had by all, bringing customers together to learn and share the experience.

As the first series was such a success, a second “Winter Warmer” series is now underway and in an exclusive event, one of our Leasehold Managers John Poile began the series from his own home with a fabulous carbonara recipe, costing £1.25 a portion. It looked fabulous when finished!

I asked John, who got into cooking through being a kitchen apprentice at the Britannia Hotel in Grosvenor Square and being part of the Army Catering Corp, about his experience of taking part and delivering the session.

John enjoys cooking for others, he wanted to support the project and this led to him getting involved. As the Health-Works team were not local to our South East area, the session was planned for John to present the session from home.

John and Lorraine discussed the logistics, and despite John being truly outside of his comfort zone, he embraced the challenge, pushed himself and set about planning to make the session a success, which it was.

Asking John if he had some practice sessions, he told me it was a recipe he was familiar with and he knew it was quite an easy one to follow. John just went for it on the day. All went smoothly and John added in some history of the recipe, suggesting other options to add in to the recipe, and offered tips. Lorraine was on hand from afar contributing also. Norfolk House customers commented on how good it looked.

Since taking part in the project, John would like to offer to help again, maybe with a Spanish or Portuguese recipe using cheaper, yet tasty, cuts of meat.

Well done John – you did great!