Looking back at live online cooking and looking forward to 1970s reminiscence
Looking back – the online Cooking Workshop with Erin
We held our first online cooking workshop this month using a recipe from our YPWD cookbook ‘Food for Thought’. This was the first time that we’d tried a live ‘Saturday Kitchen’ style cook along, but we really enjoy a challenge, and thank goodness there was only one camera!
We chose a recipe called ‘Cheat’s Cheesecake’ which was written by Sue Patterson a Community Support Worker in Wokingham who acquired the recipe over 30 years ago when travelling around Australia.
As everyone loves something sweet and the recipe looked relatively straight forward, it seemed the perfect choice for our first online cooking workshop. Six people signed up to the workshop and all ingredients were hand delivered to their homes a few days before. We all came together over Zoom with Erin leading the workshop from her kitchen.
Crushing biscuits for the cheesecake base was the first thing we did which got everyone involved in rolling and smashing the biscuits into tiny crumbs. We then moved on to weighing out the ingredients and mixing it all together to create a delicious topping for the cheesecake. The finished cheesecakes were then placed into the fridge to set overnight. Then the not so fun part of cleaning up the kitchen mess everyone had made was next on the agenda!
Following the workshop, we received lovely feedback from one of the carers saying the cooking workshop has given them confidence to bake more at home. We also received lots of feedback to say how delicious the cheesecake was.
You can download the recipe HERE
Cooking is a great activity for people diagnosed with dementia to get involved in. Not only does cooking make our taste buds happy, but it also triggers positive memories of sharing and preparing meals with loved ones.
Looking ahead – the 70s Reminiscence Workshop with Jenny and Phil
As a child born in the 1970s I confess to not knowing as much about the decade as I perhaps should, but with a little bit of Googling I discovered there is an awful lot to know. I also brought Phil Redrup into the planning as he remembers much more about the 70s than I do!
We didn’t want this workshop to be about pop cultures and fashion as we’ve got that covered in other workshops. This one is going to look at the major headlines of the time. We hadn’t quite envisaged how much had happened in the 70s, so picking out just a few key headlines proved a challenge. But after weeks of throwing ideas back and forth, we’ve made it. And I know Phil agrees, that we are incredibly pleased with what we have created.
And with that in mind I’ll leave it to Phil to round up what you can expect if you attend this workshop.
After "free love, flower power, and peace man" let’s forget the "Fab" times of the 60s. The 70s was a real change as this may have been the first inkling of Climate Change for the World. After the post war economic boom we would hit world upheavals and disruptive influences with "power to the workers" through the unions. Red Robbo was banded about in the press, on the plus side massive innovations to make our lives "easier" came about leading to a rush of packaged holidays abroad, and new breakthroughs in special effects to enhance the film industry! The T.V had three channels to choose from and still finished at midnight to the sound of the National Anthem, my how times have changed!
So do join us on this workshop, dig out your platforms, high waisters or put those safety pins back in your noses, as we take you back to the most note-worthy headlines and moments of the decade of the 1970s!