Summer Cooking with Young People in Craigmillar

Over the summer school holidays, we have been working on a four-class programme with a group of young women, aged 13-15 who are part of a local football team. The purpose of these classes was to provide some skills and training for the young people but also to plan and prepare a community meal that they would host on the last day of the project.

The young people with their fantastic dishes

This is one of our favourite styles of the project as having a goal to work towards provides great structure to the class, allows us as chefs to push the students, and also gives a sense of responsibility and achievement to the participants. It’s remarkable to watch how much growth and increased enthusiasm can be achieved in a short space of time when working towards a goal like this. 

Step One – Decide a menu

When new groups arrive for these types of projects, it can be difficult to get their menu ideas flowing initially. However, this group were full of ideas about things they wanted to make. One popular idea was lasagne as they expressed how they like store-bought lasagne but have never made it themselves. The vegetarian option was also agreed: a classic mac and cheese.

Lasagna in particular has a lot of cooking fundamentals we could cover including sourcing meat, browning meat, seasoning, bechamel, tomato sauce, and portioning. These were good dishes to do together as they both use a bechamel so that saves some cooking time. 

Day one we had planned in advance based on the ingredients we had in the kitchen. We decided it would be good to take them through curry making. Many of them admitted they used jar curries and that they were keen to know how to make it from scratch. We love showing people how to make things from scratch to avoid buying the sugar-heavy, preservative-heavy store-bought options. Ginger, chilli, cardamom, coriander, nutmeg, garlic, and many other aromas quickly filled the room. 

One team was in charge of making our curry paste for the sauce, whilst the rest were in charge of making homemade naan bread. It’s fair to say that while team naan bread did an excellent job of making delicious breads, they also did an excellent job of covering the room in flour… the dustpan and brush got a workout that day. Smothered in garlic butter it was clear that the girls were big fans of the bread they’d made. “That’s tidy” was ringing around the room.

The breads were such a hit that they decided to incorporate this into the menu for their final meal. A slight tweak of ingredients meant we could prepare garlic flatbreads for the meal; they would be very similar to the naans, but with an Italian twist. 

The meal prep 

The young people were beyond dubious about how a bechamel turned into a mac and cheese sauce. However, they followed the process, and before long a thick stringy cheese sauce was made in abundance, ready to be baked the next day for the meal. 

For dessert, the girls wanted to improve their cake-making skills. We talked through different cake techniques and the week before practised by making mini blueberry cupcakes (we have to get fruit or veg in there somehow!). The result was delicious but the floor once again ended up very floury! It’s fair to say they were enthusiastic cooks, just perhaps a little too animated when mixing dry ingredients. 

Over the two weeks, it was a pleasure to watch the group grow in confidence and watch their skills develop. There was a great moment where one of the girls said “I’m normally a fussy eater and wouldn’t try that, but I’m so glad I did as it was delicious”. This is the kind of thing we do this work for – to inspire change in habits like this. She even told us that she had planned to make the naan bread and curry for her family now that she knows how to make it from scratch. Some of the other girls insisted they needed to take some of the flatbreads and curry sauce home in order to show their parents what they’d made. 

The meal

On the day of the meal, the group fed an impressive 53 people! We had a real mixture of guests including builders from the building site next door, uses of the Hays, Edinburgh Food Project and Greenhouse pantries, Places for People staff, Craigmillar Now staff, parents and friends of the young people and just some locals. With the variety of guests in the room, the group had definitely achieved their aim of bringing the local community together.

Ready for service

The young women were so enthusiastic about the meal that they helped us carry everything up to Hays Community Centre and were very interested to see the Cargo bike being used to ferry ingredients too. Once the tables were set, the mac and cheese went quickly, followed by lasagne. Soon, all the salad was polished off as well! The girls were genuinely blown away by the food that they had made, and one young person asked the Police if they could do the project again next year.

Overall, the young people were a fantastic group to work with. They were enthusiastic, excitable, and keen to learn. Whilst at times we had to rein in this level of enthusiasm for the sake of our kitchen, it was a delight to encourage and foster this into how they think about food and their eating habits.

Thanks to Police Scotland and Community Alcohol Partnerships for funding and facilitating this project.