Cooking Chicken With Cooking Matters Colorado
Posted by Katherine Van Steenburgh on Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Editor’s Note: All summer, Share Our Strength staff will be visiting summer meals sites across the country to show our work in action. This post is part of that series. To learn more about Summer Meals, visit strength.org/summer
Do know how to divide a whole chicken? What’s the best way to defrost frozen food? What’s the healthy way to make ranch dressing? How many days is food fresh once you thaw it?
During just one Cooking Matters class in Longmont, CO, I learned the answer to all of these questions and more.
Throughout the summer meals road trip, we’ve been featuring summer meal sites and ways that the No Kid Hungry Campaign is feeding more kids during the summer. But in this post, I want to point out one element of the NKH campaign that is constant year round (summer, fall, winter, spring): Cooking Matters. Even during the summer months, Cooking Matters is teaching families and kids who to cook healthy and tasty meals on a limited budget.
I can testify to the TASTY factor, because last week I tried that healthy chicken tenders that the class cook and they were delicious and easy to fix.
The Cooking Matters class we visited was managed by Megan Hildebrandt from the Denver office and was made up of women who are on probation and taking life skills classes as part of their program. We watched as the group learned about the importance of protein, some of the myths about protein and far in our diet, and then also divided up a whole chicken- a skill that I still need to master. Then, the class cooked chicken tenders, healthy dipping sauces, and yogurt parfaits.
At the end of the class, the group shared what they learned that day. Several women shared how they learned to substitute plain yogurt instead for other ingredients like mayonnaise and how to properly defrost frozen food. One woman said, “I’m really learning to cook and I love it”. Whenever I visit a Cooking Matters class, I am reminded that Cooking Matters is giving families and kids something that can never be taken from them. It gives the participants knowledge and skills that they will have forever and be able to pass down to their families. Each student left with a bag of that night’s ingredients including a whole chicken, and more confidence in their ability to cook and prepare healthy affordable meals for their family.
Get more information on Cooking Matters at www.cookingmatters.org.
RELATED LINKS:
— Learn more about Share Our Strength’s Summer Meals work
— Help Support Summer Meals Work
August 23, 2011 | 1 comment(s) | Tags: colorado, cooking matters, summer meals
Comments
1 reader comment so far.
nice page! lok forward to more cooking tips.
Posted by mily on September 5, 2011
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