16 Feb Jamie Oliver Community Cookery School
Open Door Volunteers were recently given the opportunity to attend the Tesco Community Cookery School with Jamie Oliver.
The aim of the programme is to teach over 1,000 community cooks how best to use surplus food donations to help stop good food going to waste.
Every week Tesco donates 300,000 meals of surplus food to over 7,000 different community and charity groups around the UK – Open Door being one of them.
The Tesco Community Cookery School with Jamie Oliver has been developed in partnership with FareShare. It helps community groups by offering training and advice on how to prepare nutritionally balanced meals using surplus food donations.
One of the challenges facing some of our volunteer cooks is how to prepare unusual or unexpected ingredients and large quantities of seasonal produce. Using recipes designed by Jamie Oliver and Tesco’s development chefs will ensure our volunteers can make the most of surplus food and reduce food waste.
Open Door Volunteers were given the opportunity to learn everything from knife skills and nutrition to recipes for versatile base sauces, which can be adapted to complement a wide variety of donated food.
Volunteer Katrina Vine said:
“It was such a wonderful opportunity and such a great day. We were looked after so well. We had breakfast before we started, and the Cookery School made us all feel so welcome. We were shown how to create different types of sauces to use up different types of vegetables. I discovered I’d been cutting up onions wrongly all these years!
We were given lots of Jamie Oliver recipe books, and a hand blender to take back to Open Door. It was really inspiring to meet other volunteers who were also helping communities in need. I’m so pleased I was able to attend, It really was a day to remember, and I’ve come away feeling positive and confident to experiment in the kitchen.”
Tesco CEO Dave Lewis said:
“Surplus food donations can make a huge difference to people in need, but can also create challenges for community cooks faced with unexpected or unusual food – or large volumes of a particular product. As part of our commitment to ensure all food that is safe to eat doesn’t go to waste, we’ve set up the Tesco Community Cookery School with Jamie Oliver. With Jamie’s help, we believe we can inspire, train and support charities to do even more with the donations they receive. Together, we can bring tasty and nutritious food to more people, in communities right across the UK.”
Jamie Oliver said:
“It’s fantastic to join the work that Tesco and FareShare are doing to reduce food waste. I’ve written these recipes to arm all those amazing community cooks with the tools to create something delicious and balanced for people who need it the most. It is all about giving otherwise-wasted ingredients some love, and transforming them into tasty, nutritious meals. For me, every dish we cook that reduces food waste is a winner!”
FareShare CEO Lindsay Boswell said:
“With Tesco’s support, FareShare is working with charities across the country to help feed hundreds of thousands of people in need every week. Most of these charities provide meals made by community cooks, who may already have lots of experience and just need some new ideas; or they could do with a really good grounding in nutrition and the scaling up of meals. In either case the Tesco Community Cookery School is ideal for them, and will have a direct benefit in providing nutritious hot meals to vulnerable people.”
Open Door has sent a big ‘Thank you’ to Tesco, Fairshare and Jamie Oliver for such a fantastic day. We are always looking for new volunteers to help. If you’re interested and would like further information please contact info@opendoorstalbans.org