Charlie has found a ‘a sense of community‘ and volunteering opportunities since attending ASSERT’s Life Skills courses at our Community Kitchen.
For the last 3 years The Community Kitchen have been running community cookery sessions for ASSERT as part of their life skills programme. ASSERT is a charity which supports autistic adults and their parents, partners or carers. We spoke to Charlie, one of the participants, who since coming to the Community Kitchen has enjoyed cooking from scratch, and started volunteering at Chop and Chat supporting our Community Chef Emiliano to carefully prepare surplus vegetables ready for ‘Dennis’ our dehydrator.
“When I was young and at school we had a food class and I actually really enjoyed it. Sadly, I didn’t keep up with it. I hadn’t done any cooking for a very long time as I struggle with the kitchen in my living space. Therefore, the ASSERT cookery course was perfect.
Since attending the session I’ve made some flatbread at home, toasted seeds a few times, I even did it with teriyaki instead of soy sauce, very nice but too sticky! Because I’m going to be moving into my own space soon, I’m hoping to prevent myself from ordering food every day and actually make myself stuff. For example, I love the batch cooking here so I can make myself some meals and have it over the course of a few days.
Mental health wise I think the course has helped me with confidence. It can be very easy to put yourself down but when you do something right at the Community Kitchen like follow a recipe or cook something up, you lessen that voice a bit. I recently took food I made over to a friend’s housewarming and for dinner we dished up the three meals I had made and people loved the food. It felt really good and it was very validating to hear ‘wow that’s good’ from my friends. I wanted to share my food with my friends as much as I do because I want them to be like ‘I could go on this course’ because I genuinely think It would be really good for them.
Through the Community Kitchen and my sessions with ASSERT I have also got involved with the Ready Healthy Eat Chop and Chat sessions. At the sessions the kitchen gets in a bunch of surplus vegetables delivered by Fareshare. We cut them up into small pieces and we put them in the dehydrator which means they will stay usable for a very long time and you add boiling water to rehydrate them. They get put into pack which are given to food projects to help feed people who are struggling.
It felt like a way I could give back and help the community, there’s not much I can do to help people so when I get the chance I want to. Also it’s just fun we just talk about all kinds of random stuff, we have had many conversations about many different strange topics, from discussions of films we’ve been watching to tv series to how to survive a zombie apocalypse.
I would 100% recommend the Community Kitchen to other people and I think there’s a number of reasons, you get to learn to cook, there’s a sense of community, it’s fun, its informative and also you have a good time.”
