Welcome to our new cooking skills blog. It aims to be useful for anyone who runs, or manages community cooking skills courses for people who are vulnerable or trying to manage on a low-income.

We’ve started this blog for two reasons:

1.    We recently began an 18-month cooking skills study group of eight organisations who’ll be thoroughly evaluating their cooking skills courses over the next year. As we won’t analyse their collective evaluation materials and report on their work until 2017, we’ll use this blog to:

• keep you informed about what they are doing
• tell you about the evaluation methods they find useful
• share tips from them about running cooking skills courses

2.    To share anything we learn from reading published reports or attending meetings and conferences about the impact of cooking skills courses

You can find out more about the cooking skills study group, why we set it up, and what its members are expected to do in ‘About our work’.

We’ll update the blog every fortnight and we’ll use a range of formats to keep you informed.

Cooking skills information on our website

We have lots of information about cooking skills on our website. You might not be aware of it all, so here’s a round-up of what we have:

• Easy, healthy, affordable recipes
• Pictorials recipes useful for people with learning disabilities or people with literacy issues and ‘how to’ videos
• Guides and toolkits on how to run cooking skills activities
• Cooking skills courses in your area
• Where to get training to run cooking skills activities
• Learning from community initiatives about running cooking skills activities, including information about health and safety
• Learning from community initiatives about evaluating cooking skills activities
• Case studies
• CFHS research
• Information about the Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland (REHIS) accredited Elementary Cooking skills course

Kim Newstead

Kim.newstead@nhs.net