‘The Best Things in Life are Free’

Mar 27, 2020 | Events

So they say, but most of the time we are too busy to notice. 

Now that we are all having to stay indoors, our world will, for a short time get smaller and, in many ways, simpler. Staying at home is throwing up challenges we aren’t used to in our daily living but generations before us were very familiar with.

At the moment finding new things to busy ourselves (and the children) with at home is oddly taking us back to the way people used to live, when times were slower, and family was everything. As with any life challenge, we can choose to see this as an opportunity.  

Right now, we are being given the chance to remember ‘lost’ skills from family members who are often overlooked, and there’s a lot to learn. It’s crazy to think that currently, UK households throw away up to 2.9m tonnes of food before it’s even cooked. Things we routinely throw away that are often perfectly edible and past generations would have eagerly used.

Many grandparents say they learnt to cook when they were a child, helping as food was being prepared. Making jam tartlets with grandmother in simpler times was something most children would have done, but recent research shows that almost half of today’s grandparents have never cooked with their grandchildren. They worry that a lack of cooking skills and resource management will harm their health in the long term. 

So maybe this is the time to bring back learning at grandma’s knee, maybe it’s the time to bring back the love of cooking and bring back the pride in making something for others from scratch. Many older members of families are currently in self-isolation and this is one way we can contact, be it via Skype, Zoom, Facetime, WhatsApp or the good old-fashioned telephone!

Join The Kitchen Partners as we start to collect old recipes, collating and preserving them in a digital recipe book. A modern-day ‘Granny’s Cookbook’ if you will. Become part of a community whose very own favourite or family recipes, will be a treasure shared through this digital resource. 

By creating a digital recipe book, we also want to discourage food waste by helping educate the younger generation on how to create tasty meals from leftovers and how to make food spread a little further, just as our grandparents traditionally would have done. 

So, whether it be Grandma’s famous chicken hot pot, Uncle Joe’s hearty cottage pie or Nana’s comforting potato cakes and bubble and squeak, we want to preserve family favourite recipes for future generations to enjoy. 

The Kitchen Partners is creating a digital cookbook to store passed down recipes for all to use. If you have a nostalgic dish that’s stood the test of time, or perhaps you’ve created your own family tradition in the kitchen, we’d love to try it!

Together, let’s see the country stay connected, through cooking wholesome, hearty, homely food.

Join our #thekitchenpartners community and submit your recipe and don’t forget to share your #thekitchenpartners on socials with this hashtag.

Have a great weekend

Clinton and Fiona