Cooking Matters Class – Detroit Community-Engaged Research Program

I absolutely LOVE food! I love cooking it, eating it, mixing it, and etcetera, so this cooking class was right up my alley! Today was the first day of Friends of Parkside’s “Cooking Matters for Adults” class. Gleaners Community Food Bank offers about 7 different cooking classes, each focuses on a different dynamic. Cooking Matters for Adults teaches low-income families how to eat healthy and grocery shop on a budget. FOP tried this class back in April, but there must be at least 10 participants in order for the class to continue and they only had 6. Also the idea is to have the same faces each week we meet, so once you sign up you are expected to commit to and complete the 6 week cooking class. This time we signed all of the employees at FOP up who were over 18 and hadn’t completed the 6 week program just in case we were short our minimum of 10. We had 21 people show up to this class and they were pumped to learn about healthy eating and cooking.

It’s funny how you think you know something, but you really don’t! I learned quite a bit in this two hour class today. For example, for each meal we eat this is how the portion sizes of each food group should look on our plates:

My plate NEVER looks like this! We also talked about how the size of entrees at restaurants are outrageous and we always recognize that “whoa this is a lot of food”, but we always eat all of it. We did a lot of talking about healthy eating, but then we actually got in the kitchen and did some cooking! The first healthy meal we learned how to make was Barley Jambalaya. It’s basically all vegetables and barley, but there is 4 oz of turkey burger. This was the finished product:

I was so excited, but the best part was…for every class they give EVERY participant a grocery bag filled with all of the ingredients used to make the dish of the day!! So guess what I did when I got home?