Cooking for Life Begins
At last the idea of a cooking class featuring nutrition information and low-cost recipes for families with young children has started. On Sunday June 29th, 11 people met for the first workshop in the Cooking For Life series. There were six participants and five mentors.
The food group feature for the day was calcium so we did an activity to improve label reading skills and think about where you can get calcium.
The main course was Mexican Mess, a type of Mexican lasagna. It includes cheese, a calcium rich food. We didn’t eat the food on site, because the idea was to take it home for supper. One of the participants already reported she served it for supper and her family loved it!
We prepared home-made pudding. It was cool because everyone learned it was easy to do, a lot cheaper than the little prepared packs and a better source of calcium.
4-H’ers volunteered to watch the kids while the adults cooked. They had fun coloring and playing with playdoh.
At the end of the session all of the participants received a set of Pyrex dishes, all of the ingredients in the meals, bags to put them in, and two cans of green beans to cook at home.
I think everyone had a great time for the first session and learned a lot. They identified they would like to learn to make ham Balls or meat loaf, cheesy macaroni corn, and apple crisp at the July session.
There is a lot of support from the community. The Adair County 4-H Youth Council, Nodaway Valley Market, Fareway, Pamida, Thrivent, Summerset Citizens, and Empowerment have all given cash resources for this project.
Hopefully there will be a number of benefits to this project. Goals of the projects are to build a strong community support system for young families and provide an opportunity for young families to develop new skills in cooking, organization, planning, and budgeting.