Last year, Katy Gordon, a PhD student took part in an internship within CFHS. Katy ran an online survey and interviewed practitioners to find out how they supported people experiencing food insecurity on their cooking skills courses. Her full report ‘Just getting on with it’ is now available. Meanwhile here are few examples of activities they …
Cookery skills
Cooking skills blog 33: Working with vulnerable groups: Supporting people affected by food insecurity: ideas from practitioners
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Recruiting and working with vulnerable groups
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Food poverty and access, Information provision
Cooking skills blog 32: Practitioner guest blog: ‘the benefits of being forgetful and burning rice’
Chris Mantle ANutr, Senior Food and Health Development Worker, is our guest blogger this week. Chris is a member of our cooking skills study group and runs regular cooking courses for Edinburgh Community Food. Chris gives his thoughts on the benefits of not always being the perfect cook when running community cooking courses. ‘Having grown up – essentially …
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Ideas about developing and running cooking skills courses
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Information provision
Cooking skills blog 30: What are the best recipes to use on a cooking skills course? Part 2.
All the practitioners in our cooking skills study group hope that people on their courses will make the recipes they have learned on the course again at home. Most are encouraging course participants to choose the recipes for some, or all of the course sessions, and I have already written a post (see blog 14) …
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Ideas about developing and running cooking skills courses
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Information provision
Cooking skills blog 29: Finding out if your cooking skills courses are ‘working’: Guest blog: what’s the difference between ‘observation’ and ‘third party’?
All members of our cooking skills study group are aiming to use a combination of three different evaluation sources to find out if their courses are ‘working’, by sourcing evaluation materials from 1) the course practitioner (as an ‘observer’), 2) the participant (‘self-reporting’) and 3) and a third source such as a ‘third party’ who …
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Finding out if your cooking skills courses are working
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Information provision, Research and evaluation
Cooking skills blog 28: How do cooking course practitioners support people experiencing food insecurity?
Katy Gordon, a PhD student took part in an internship within the CFHS programme late last year. She focused on a project on food insecurity and cooking courses and carried out an online survey and interviewed practitioners from six organisations. Here are the main findings from a report (which will be available in May). Six …
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Recruiting and working with vulnerable groups
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Food poverty and access, Information provision
Cooking skills blog 27: Cooking skills research: Are you more likely to cook if you have cooking skills?
This blog post looks at a research article which suggests that possessing cooking ‘skills’ is only one of a range of factors associated with whether a person is actually more likely to cook their meals at home. The article explored who is more likely to cook at home and why; and what impact home cooking …
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Cooking skills research
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Information provision, Research and evaluation
Cooking skills Blog 26: Finding out if your cooking skills courses are ‘working’: Using both questionnaires and observation as methods
This week, my colleague Jacqui and I have been visiting members of our cooking skills study group and discussing what we have been finding out so far from some of their course evaluation materials. All members of the group are aiming to collect more robust evaluation materials from their courses than they might do usually. …
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Finding out if your cooking skills courses are working
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Information provision, Research and evaluation
Cooking skills blog 25: Finding out if your cooking skills courses are ‘working’: Guest blog by Jacqui McDowell: ‘The confidence conundrum’
This week, my colleague Jacqui McDowell gives her views on the challenges (and possible solutions) to measuring confidence: ‘If I could, I’d ban people from using the word confidence in the context of cooking classes. Extreme – probably, wrong – I’ll let you decide. Confidence is a tricky thing to measure and assess accurately, whether …
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Finding out if your cooking skills courses are working
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Information provision
CFHS cooking skills learning exchange 2016
Our cooking skills learning exchange took place at the Apex Grassmarket Hotel in Edinburgh on 10 November 2016. The event was aimed at those who plan to, or already run, manage or commission community cooking skills courses in low-income communities in Scotland, and who were looking to improve the way they run, review and assess …
Posted in CFHS updates, Events and conferences, News
Area of Work: Cookery skills
Just getting on with it
Practitioners who run cooking skills courses have told us that they have worked with course participants who may be experiencing food insecurity and were struggling to feed themselves and their families. We wanted to explore this issue further by undertaking a short project to find out: what methods community cooking course practitioners currently use to support those …