Local students were given a cooking lesson Tuesday in a Cooking Matters Course hosted by nutrition students at Ohio Wesleyan University and sponsored by the United Way of Delaware County.
Chris Fink, an associate professor of Health and Human Kinetics at OWU, said the one-hour course for students was a simplified version of the Cooking Matters course that the Delaware County Hunger Alliance has been doing since the fall of 2014.
Fink said the original course teaches adults how to make healthy meals for the families that costs less that $1.40 per serving and runs for six weeks, twice a year.
The course being offered to students during United Way’s Strengthening Families Spring Break activities was only a one-hour course and taught about nutrition and how to make orange oatmeal pancakes and yogurt fruit dip.
OWU students supervised as the participants gathered and measured ingredients, mixed the pancakes and baked the pancakes in a frying pan. The OWU students handled blending the yogurt and handling the frying pan but students learned how to put the batter in the pan and how and when to flip a pancake.
“We want to promote healthy eating as a tasty thing,” Fink said. He said students would also be able to take ingredients home to make the meals for their families.
“It helps them participate in not just cooking, but also by having them try new things,” Fink said.
He said the course is a great opportunity for the OWU students, who are mostly health or nutrition majors too, because it gives them experience in translating nutritional information into understandable and teachable lessons, which isn’t something they would normally do in their regular studies.
“They come out with a lot of knowledge and have a lot of doors open for them,” Fink said.
Sixth-grade students in the course, Audra Lyon and Ava Prenger, said they enjoyed the cooking lesson.
“I signed up to do something over Spring Break,” Lyon joked, “and now I’ve learned how to bake.”
Prenger said she has come to other activities hosted by the United Way in the past and said her favorite part of the course was learning how to make the pancakes.
The course was one of several activities hosted by the United Way over spring break week including yoga, an open gym, Lego team-building and a movie screening.
