Cooking and preserving!

It’s now February and the time since our last post here has just flown! So what were we up to at the end of last year?

We had weekly healthy cook-alongs with families at Rainbow Family Centre in Port Glasgow, Barnados and Craigend Resource Centre. It was an absolute pleasure working with the families and children who we hope will want to cook from scratch more at home in the future.

Our focus was on plant based, easy to cook, nutritious recipes and we had great feedback! One participant who had never used lentils in cooking said she has started to use them after making lentil bolognese in the cooking workshop. We included plenty of vegetables, some of which we hope we can help people grow this year.

We also worked with the regular group of volunteers at Parklea (Wednesdays 1-3) on a variety of food and growing related activities - making oils, balms and tea bags with herbs growing in the garden and chutneys and jams for the Christmas fayre.

Preserving and pickling is an important part of the growing year and we hope to get a monthly group going this year to make sure that any gluts in the community gardens can be used up. We are also hoping to include fermenting - sauerkrauts and kimchi - to share with the community to promote better gut health. If you are interested, please get in touch!