Encouraging children to cook Yummy Mummy healthy meals
By Aimee Walsh
A MOTHER and daughter duo have brought child-led cooking classes into homes over Zoom in hopes to encourage children to learn to cook healthy meals.
Originally from Fermanagh, Tallaght resident Jolene Cox and seven-year-old daughter Lily Mae have begun running cooking online classes on a weekly basis.
Jolene and Lily Mae during one of the workshops
Jolene runs award winning blog ‘OneYummyMummy.com’ and is the author of cookbook ‘One Yummy Mummy: Family Food made easy’.
Jolene explained that the idea of the cook-along demo, led by Lily Mae, is to give kids a relief from home schooling, as well as the chance to learn a new skill.
“The kids are back in home schooling now, and I wanted to do something really light-hearted where they’ll cook lunch and we will have a laugh and it will be a bit of light relief. We started that a few weeks ago, and its free.
“We are five weeks in now and we get about 50 signing up each week. We do it every Wednesday from 1pm-2pm.
“The kids have been fantastic, they all send me pictures of what they have made afterwards, and the feedback has been great.” Jolene told The Echo.
The idea stemmed from a cooking programme Jolene was doing in classes for parents in schools, teaching them how to cook while keeping it accessible and easy.
When Covid hit, the programme got shut down, which led Jolene to apply for an Enterprise Ireland programme to bring it online. Her website to launch ‘Family Cooking Club’ is currently under development.
“As the third lockdown came, I wanted to do some workshops with kids, they have been troopers in all of this.”, Jolene explained.
Meatball subs, pasta carbonara and sausage rolls are some of the items that have been on the menu in recent weeks. Jolene says they keep it close to natural ingredients as possible and swap out some ingredients for healthier alternatives such as swapping sausage for pork mince.
“I send out the ingredients on a Monday on a recipe card, and the recipe card is done on a child format, so that it can be read by kids.
“I think about recipes that they can actually do themselves.
“I wanted to do lunches, as the whole idea is that they cook the lunch and the whole family sit down and eat it.”
You can sign up for the cook-along classes by heading to Jolene’s social media pages by searching ‘One Yummy Mummy’.
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