Cooking On A Budget

Life Skills - Cooking on a Budget course

Many students moving onto university after A levels - living way from home for the first time  - often arrive with next to no cookery skills let alone the ability to eat healthily or buy ingredients sensibly. Sadly this can soon lead to a depression at a time in their lives when they should be having fun, settling into an important new chapter in their young lives.  As a club we could identify that there was a need for some support in this area and a course in basic cooking skills looked to be the answer. Hence our “Life Skills - Cooking on a Budget" course was born!

In collaboration with Nick Batten, Senior Catering Manager at Cornwall College a format evolved and the first course ran on Friday 29th October. It was attended by nine students - two apprentices from Pendennis Shipyard and seven A level students from Falmouth School. Transport to and from Falmouth to the college was provided by Cornwall College and the five hour course was run in the superb kitchens of the Catering Wing at Cornwall College, Camborne during which time they were shown how to prepare and cook four vegan style dishes. 

At the end of the course the students were all presented with a simple cook book (kindly produced by Cornwall College) containing the recipes of the four dishes they had prepared, the cover of which bore our club logo alongside that of Cornwall College 

The course was incredibly well received by all of the students and without exception the feedback was superb. All were highly enthusiastic and said they had found the course extremely worthwhile. And we could not have run it without the fantastic help and enthusiasm from the start of Nick Batten and his wonderful team at Cornwall College

Repeat courses will be held in February and June 2022. Furthermore we are extremely hopeful that it will become a permanent fixture in our club’s calendar triennially each year in the future. And it is also our club's intention to develop the “Life Skills” concept further into other fields such as Finance and DIY 

This project was jointly funded by Falmouth Rotary Club and Cornwall County Council.