A CLASS WAY TO LEARN..
Community initiative is able to teach people from all sorts of backgrounds and cooking abilities to make healthier, cheaper meals
FROM FOOD bloggers to picture-perfect Instagram snaps, you would be forgiven for thinking that whipping up a healthy and nutritious meal takes time, energy and specialist skills.
But one community cooking group is aiming to dispel the myth that eating well and cooking from scratch has to be hard, by teaching new skills to eager local residents with twice weekly classes.
Meeting at The Rainbow Family Centre in Port Glasgow, Inverclyde, the group attracts everyone from single parents to retirees – but they all share the same goal of learning skills in the kitchen.
Cath Tearne, the local health improvement senior who organises groups across Inverclyde, knows just how important the classes are for those who attend. She said: “The groups are delivered across community venues and they are all free. We cook two meals each week and the courses last for six weeks.
“Some people have come along and said they don’t know how to cook at all so, for a lot of people, this is just a starter.
“A lot of them come on the course and they are amazed at how easy and cheap it is to make a pot of soup or a bolognese or a full cooked dinner.”
Charlie McKay is one of the class leaders at The Rainbow Family Centre, and praises the help given by the initiative.
He said: “At the course I ran just before Christmas, I had an 18-year-old mum and a 92-year-old gentleman – it’s varied, it’s not specifically aimed at certain people and it’s open to the community.
“There are people who have got experience of cooking and they want to try different things and you’ve got people who have never boiled an egg before in their lives.”
Above, we talk to some of the participants.