As well as supporting emergency food providers, we also want to encourage people to love cooking! Cooking from scratch can save money – and often time – and with a bit of knowledge it can also help you to make positive choices for your health. With a little support to build your skills and confidence, cooking can become a true pleasure. It’s also a great activity to do with family, putting your kitchen at the heart of your home. Good food really can bring people together.
Recipe Bags
Here at The Roundhouse, we are often inundated with certain types of foods, like in-season vegetables or long-life foods. Twenty kilos of root ginger turned up once. 60 kilos of rolled oats. 40 fresh cauliflowers. Countless tins of chickpeas. We cook with this food, but we also use it to provide recipe bags for people who go along to larders or collect parcels from Foodbanks. These bags contain a recipe sheet, as well as all the ingredients needed to make the dish. Our recipes often include suggestions of how to change the dish if you don’t have exactly the same ingredients next time, and ideas about how to tinker with the flavours when you’re serving the food.
Recipe Cards
As part of our 2021 pilot project, we developed a set of recipes which we provided through our partner food projects. We talked to local food workers, invited ideas from our volunteer team and consulted with literacy support groups. One of our volunteers illustrated some of the dishes, we researched the cost of ingredients and fuel for cooking, and gave this information with each set of cards. The cards were laminated, so that all those cooking splashes could be wiped off, and we gave out wee rings so that people could add the recipes together and build their own book.
Take a look at some of the recipes we’ve provided. You can download our illustrated recipe cards or simpler recipe sheets and print them at home! These recipes are available for you to use and share for free. You can also pick up sheets from our café, often with some of the fresh ingredients to make them.
If you’d like to make a donation to our work, click here to be redirected to the Signpost International donations page.