Cooking for a different audience

Posted on Monday, 26 September 2011 by Executive Chef Martin Latter

They were a tough audience – asked lots of intelligent questions and put me on the spot more than once – and I loved it.

 

This was the second series of my ‘cooking with the community’ where I deliver basic nutrition and cooking classes to our friends from West End Community House (WECH).

 

These are a great group of people of all ages from 18 to 80 years who might sometimes struggle a little in life and my aim is to demonstrate some useful living skills and hopefully give them a few tips to help improve their quality of life.

 

WECH provides much needed community services in our local neighbourhood and is also a long term partner of our community engagement program.

 

Every Wednesday for four weeks, the group made its way to the Convention Centre to learn about healthy eating, shopping choices and affordable meals.

 

The classes are always held in one of our several satellite kitchens around the Centre, where all the ingredients and equipment are prepared and ready to go. 

 

 

We cover a lot of ground in the classes, from unravelling the mysteries of food labelling, buying cheap while still making healthy choices and how to cook the cheaper cuts of meat and poultry as well as fish.  I try to make the classes as interesting and personal and as much fun as I can.

 

Each session seems to produce a standout performer and this time round there was what seemed to me a galaxy of star pupils – ‘Paul’ decided to take himself off to the butcher and buy some beef cheeks and osso bucco and cook them at home. I was absolutely thrilled, this hadn’t happened before and this to me showed the real success of the project.

 

‘Bill’ a bushie who had worked on cattle stations around Australia could have taught me a thing or two about bush cooking and he did! And then there was Nora. Nora was everyone’s favourite and kept the group’s enthusiasm bubbling along for the duration – her energy and spirit were inspiring.

 

Our final lesson was held in our restaurant kitchen – it was a grand cook off featuring lamb curry, chicken stir fry and braised beef cheeks where the small group more than ably demonstrated their new found skills in the kitchen. 

We all lunched together on the Terrace outside Merivales Restaurant and were joined in the fun and sense of achievement by the Centre’s General Manager, Bob O’Keeffe and our Food and Beverage Director, Kevin Gulliver.

 

 

 

 The feedback we have received from WECH has been generously favourable and encouraging with the group confident in their newly acquired knowledge and awareness, particularly about healthy eating. And there was a bonus in having received a bit of a boost in confidence and self esteem along the way. So a big thank you to all those who put up with my rather unorthodox teaching methods, I honestly believe I take away more from these lessons than the participants.