News

Ten families in Park Wood are now leading healthier lifestyles, thanks to a slow cookery course run by Fusion Healthy Living Centre.

The eight week course, funded by Golding Vision, the community arm of Golding Homes, was inspired by the British Heart Foundation’s “take 10 minutes” range of booklets on how to keep your heart healthy.

At each of the two hour weekly sessions, participants prepared two slow cookery recipes together to take home, one to eat that evening and one put into a zip lock bag to be cooked the next day.

Amy Bartlett, Community Development Worker at Fusion said: “The ultimate aim of the course, aside from the cooking, was for people to gain an increased desire and ability to eat and live healthily. Slow cookers lend themselves low fat cooking. They are cheap to buy and to run and they work well with low cost ingredients so they were the perfect choice for the course.”

Debbie Forester, a local resident of Parkwood was keen to join the course after seeing it advertised through the centre. Her main aims were to learn new skills, eat healthier and be able to make meals from scratch for her family.

Since starting the course, Debbie has used her slow cooker every day to prepare a range of healthy meals for her family.  She said: “The course has changed our eating habits, I have lost weight in the last eight weeks and my blood pressure has dropped. Takeaways are now a thing of the past and the course has helped me feel a lot healthier.  I would recommend the fish and new potatoes recipe which is really tasty.”

Golding Vision supported the course by funding the supply of all the cookery equipment, ingredient and the slow cookers, which the participants were able to keep at the end of the course.

Caroline McBride, Head of Community Development at Golding Homes said “We want to help our residents to make informed choices and improve their health and wellbeing and were delighted to fund this successful course.  This was a great opportunity for residents to learn how to prepare healthy meals on a budget and to change their lifestyles.”

A further slow cookery course will be run in Tovil in the autumn. Look out on our Facebook page and website for more information.