Cookery skills

One of the barriers to a healthy diet is having the skills, knowledge and confidence to shop for, and prepare, healthy meals. Community-based cookery sessions can offer a relaxed environment to learn cookery skills.

Sessions can either happen within an existing group or be open to all. They might take place in a local community centre but some areas have community kitchens for hire.

CFHS works to demonstrate the benefits of community cookery sessions, and to share learning from community food initiatives in order to improve their practice.

Our plan for 2018/19

  • Disseminate learning from our realist evaluation of cooking skills activities –  its self-evaluation focus and the findings that showed the positive impact that community cooking courses may have on people and their families
  • Develop opportunities for practitioners to put knowledge into action by building on learning from the realist evaluation of cooking skills

News and updates

Reasons to be cheerful part 2 – CFHS cooking skills research. What did we learn about the best ways to run a cooking skills course?

Posted: January 17, 2019
Our cooking skills study group realist evaluation (2016-2018), gathered information from 29 community cooking skills courses (attended by 75 adults -all of whom were managing ...

Do you run or manage community cooking skills activities in Scotland?

Posted: June 15, 2017
If, yes, please consider completing our survey. If your organisation has more than one person who runs cooking skills activities on behalf of your organisation, ...

Cooking skills blog 33: Working with vulnerable groups: Supporting people affected by food insecurity: ideas from practitioners

Posted: June 9, 2017
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 ...

Cooking skills blog 32: Practitioner guest blog: ‘the benefits of being forgetful and burning rice’

Posted: May 25, 2017
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 ...

Cooking skills blog 30: What are the best recipes to use on a cooking skills course? Part 2.

Posted: April 27, 2017
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 ...

Cooking skills blog 29: Finding out if your cooking skills courses are ‘working’: Guest blog: what’s the difference between ‘observation’ and ‘third party’?

Posted: April 6, 2017
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 ...

Cooking skills blog 28: How do cooking course practitioners support people experiencing food insecurity?

Posted: March 23, 2017
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 ...

Cooking skills blog 27: Cooking skills research: Are you more likely to cook if you have cooking skills?

Posted: March 9, 2017
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 ...

Cooking skills Blog 26: Finding out if your cooking skills courses are ‘working’: Using both questionnaires and observation as methods

Posted: February 17, 2017
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 ...

Cooking skills blog 25: Finding out if your cooking skills courses are ‘working’: Guest blog by Jacqui McDowell: ‘The confidence conundrum’

Posted: February 2, 2017
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 ...