Cooking matters nutrition class Juniper Gardens 2016

Bienestar partnered with Oregon Food Bank to offer Cooking Matters Nutrition Class at Juniper Gardens apartments in Forest Grove. Cooking Matters helps families shop for and cook healthy meals on a budget. The main goal of this program is to show our families how to cook healthy, affordable and delicious menus. The Oregon Food Bank provided all of the cooking utensils, ingredients for recipes in class, take home bags, and nutrition books. The Oregon Food Bank also provided a great helper Kathy Carver an OFB volunteer. Kathy was in charge of doing all the shopping for class, and helped the class run smoothly.

How does it work? Cooking Matters nutrition class for adults has a duration of six weeks, with a two-hour class each week. The course covers meal preparation, tips for grocery shopping, food budgeting and nutrition. At the end of each class participants take home a bag of groceries so they may recreate the recipe and share it with their families. This term in nutrition class at Juniper Gardens we had 11 participants. All of them learned about the importance of healthy habits, new easy ways to cook, and most important, we were able to prove to them that cooking healthy and delicious is possible within a budget.

Cooking Matters Included the following recipes: -Black bean brownies -Frittata -Salmon Pasta Bake -Tex Mex Skillet -Pineapple Carrot Muffins And many more; participants were able to cook two recipes per class.

At the end of the six weeks the results for the pre-term test and post-term test showed us that the 11 participants successfully learned about the importance of healthy habits such as : -Having breakfast daily -Drinking water instead of soda -Eating whole grains -Eating fruits and green vegetables -Staying active