The answer may depend on what the people (participants) attending your course want to get out of it and what you (and your funders) hope it will achieve. The amount of time you have, and participant to practitioner ratio may also have an effect on what outcomes you might be able to achieve. Spending a …
Cookery skills
Cooking skills blog 7 – What difference do you hope your cooking skills courses will make?
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Finding out if your cooking skills courses are working
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Information provision
Blog 6 – What does it mean to support ‘vulnerable’ people on your cooking skills course?
Our cooking skills study group are running their cooking skills courses for ‘vulnerable people’ and/or ‘parents (or carers)’ living on a ‘low-income’. As we’ll be gathering collective evaluation information, we had to agree on how we define these categories. Defining ‘vulnerable’ wasn’t easy. It can include many people, from a recently widowed older man to …
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Recruiting and working with vulnerable groups
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Information provision
Cooking skills blog 5: Does your group eat together at the end of a cooking skills session?
How do you decide what to do with the food that has been cooked? Should participants take the food home (to share with others, or eat later) or is it better to eat a meal together (prepared either together or separately) or a mixture of both of these? Does it matter? Your choice might depend …
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Ideas about developing and running cooking skills courses
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Information provision
Cooking skills blog 4: Do you tailor (or target) your cooking skills courses to suit individual needs?
Our cooking skills study group has already met and agreed a list of outcomes that each of them will evaluate when they run their courses over the next six months. However, all members of the group run their cooking skills courses differently to each other, and they run each of their courses differently. They will …
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Ideas about developing and running cooking skills courses
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Information provision
Cooking skills blog 3: research on involving children in cooking
In this fortnight’s blog, I’ll look at two presentations from the COOK and Health Scientific Symposium held at the Basque Culinary Center in San Sebastian that my colleague Jacqui attended last November. Both suggested that involving children in hands-on cooking programmes can have a positive impact on their diet (at least in the short-term) and …
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Cooking skills research
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Families with children, Information provision
Cooking skills blog 2: research on involving children and their parents in cooking
Last November, my CFHS colleague, Jacqui McDowell, attended the COOK and Health Scientific Symposium held at the Basque Culinary Center in San Sebastian. This shared up-to-date academic knowledge on the relationships between cooking, eating behaviours and health. In this fortnight’s blog, I’ll highlight one piece of the research presented which focused on involving children and …
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Cooking skills research
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Families with children, Information provision
Cooking skills blog
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.
Posted in CFHS Blog, CFHS updates, Cooking course resources, News
Areas of Work: Cookery skills, Information provision
CFHS cooking skills study group
We are currently running an 18-month long cooking skills study group for eight organisations – NHS, local authority and community initiatives from across Scotland who are supporting people who are vulnerable or from low-income communities. The organisations are Fife Health and Social Care Partnership, NHS Grampian, Edinburgh Community Food, Healthy Valleys, Lanarkshire Community Food and …
Posted in CFHS updates
Area of Work: Cookery skills
Ready Steady Ping!
Includes sections on: effective training, food hygiene and safety, Eatwell Plate, microwave cookery and microwave recipes.
Publishers: Community Food and Health (Scotland), NHS Borders, Scottish Borders Council
Publication category: Cooking and growing
Keyword: cookery sessions
Area of Work: Cookery skills
Cooking skills blog 8 – How do you find out if your cooking skills courses are ‘working’?
In the last blog, I talked about focusing on what it is you want your cooking courses to achieve. Once you have done that, you need to think about how to find out if your course has (or hasn’t) achieved this. For many groups, it will be enough to have an informal discussion with participants …