Jamie’s Ministry of Food North East – Food Revolution Day 2013

Great to hear about how the Ministry of Food Centres across the country supported Food Revolution Day. They are doing their very best to “Keep cooking skills alive”. A message below from Joanna who works at Jamie’s Ministry of Food in the North East. Food Revolution Day went great here at Jamie’s Ministry of Food Read the full article…

Ministry of Food centres across the UK showed great support for Food Revolution Day 2013. A message below from Joanna who works at Jamie’s Ministry of Food in the North East.

Food Revolution Day went great here at Jamie’s Ministry of Food North East. We had a couple of activities taking place on the day which involved a primary school cook-off and an information stand outside our kitchen.

The Cook-Off

We had 4 of the local primary schools (all part of the Change 4 Life East Newcastle Partnership) each bring a team of 5 children between 9 and 10 years old to take part in the ‘Food Rev. Day Cook Off’. All 4 schools came along and after some chopping skills practice they got dressed up in their aprons and chef hats to take part in the official competition. We transformed our kitchen by moving our benches around in order to fit in a nice space for our audience, which was made of teachers, parents and some Food Nation volunteers. The children were all given the same instructions to make Chicken Fajitas and were each given an advisor from our team of Cooking Skills Trainers. The children were in charge of making all the decisions on the size and shape of their vegetables, measuring out their spices to make the best flavour and all had plenty of opinions on how they were going to present their fajitas on their platter ready for judging. There was a great atmosphere and excitement in the kitchen the whole time and all the children loved posing for our visitor, a photographer from local newspaper The Chronicle.

Once the children had completed their dishes and displayed them on the judging table, they waiting patiently for the guest judge Karen Alexander, Food Nation Catering Enterprise Manager, to taste each dish and present each of the prizes. Prizes for presentation, flavour, team work and technique were given out. To end the afternoon an overall winning school were chosen and presented with their cook off by the Change 4 Life East Newcastle Mascot, Belta the Bunny. West Walker Primary School were the winners and received a special cookery class for children at their school as a prize.

The Info Stand

We popped up the Food Nation gazebo and had some great volunteers working with Hazel, cooking skills trainer, to let every passer by know all about Food Rev Day. We managed to entice in quite a few people with our homemade hummus and gave out plenty of information about our upcoming courses which everyone was really keen to sign up for.