Caring Cooks release recipe cards and videos to help food bank users

The Caring Cooks

A group of young people from Sandwell have come together to produce a series of short videos and recipe cards to help inspire and support families on low incomes to create healthy meals.

Supported by Creative Black Country through our Creative Communities strand and funded by the People’s Postcode Lottery, the project, started by Sandwell Advocacy, is called Caring Cooks, and aims to help young people and families on low incomes to develop food preparation skills and create healthy affordable meals.

"We have a thriving user-engagement group comprised of current and ex users of our Advocacy Project for Young Carers”. Comments Juanita Williams of Sandwell Advocacy.

"We continually involve them in the planning of our services and they have co-produced this project. They have told us that many of their families rely on food banks and that they want to be able to plan and prepare healthy food with the ingredients that are available to them.”

The project will enable children and young people to develop key skills around planning and preparing healthy meals and understanding how healthy food options are produced and accessed locally.

Juanita says: “The group wanted to be able to plan and prepare healthy meals with ingredients found at food banks. They also wanted to learn about locally grown healthy food, basic food hygiene, safety in the kitchen and to be able to showcase their journey through film and photography."

Working with a graphic designer and filmmaker the Caring Cooks, who are aged between 8-15 years old, are sharing their new found knowledge by producing special recipe cards that will be distributed via the Black Country Foodbank network. A series of short films have also been posted on YouTube to show people how they can make the recipes at home.

As part of their research the Caring Cooks visited the BBC Good Food Show to help find ideas and inspiration. “It was great for the young people to visit the Good Food Show and see how the experts and celebrity chefs present their food. It gave them great ideas around the type of food they wanted to make.”



The Caring Cooks have produced six recipes that include Corned Beef Meatballs, Chickpea Curry, Vegetable Curry, Macaroni Cheese, a no bake Cheesecake and smoothies. The recipe cards are also available to download from sandwelladvocacy.org/caring-cooks-project and will be available to pick up at find at food banks.

Please share your recipes via the twitter account http://www.twitter.com/YCadvocacy and the hashtag #caringcookssandwell