Food for thought: meet the chef taking students under her wing

Want your kids to learn how to cook? An online course can whip them into shape

XANTHE CLAY

alad days are here; the long, lazy summer before university. But while exams may be done with and courses chosen, festival tickets bought and gap-year travel planned, there’s another crucial factor to sort before heading off. How will next term’s students be feeding themselves once lectures start?

Some of the students may have already done Duke of Edinburgh Awards – more than 153,000 last year – which may have included a segment of cookery as part of the skills programme for young people.

But learning to cook, whether for the DofE award or just as a valuable life skill, isn’t straightforward. Some may have learnt from their parents, but the reality of busy family life makes covering all the basics hard. And let’s face it, many teenagers aren’t keen on being told what to do by their mum and dad.

Other than that, the options up until now have either been an expensive hands-on cookery course, possibly miles away, or teaching yourself with books and YouTube videos – potentially frustrating and chaotic.

Consequently, many 16- to 18-yearolds leave school with no idea how to cook for themselves, leading chef Heston Blumenthal recently to call for food and nutrition classes to be made mandatory “at least” to GCSE level.

Until that happens, a new online course by Lorna Wing could offer a helping hand: it’s a structured 12-week course, with Wing, an experienced cook and teacher, only a phone call

– or WhatsApp message – away. What’s more, the course offers accreditation for the DofE scheme. It’s not the first online course, but it is the first to offer this level of support and flexibility. The price is reasonable, too – £150, including one-to-one feedback on every recipe the students cook.

I met up with Wing at her elegant Lorna Wing’s course is reasonably priced to help get students cooking