practical living
Add a little spice
Joyce Patze and Vincenza Di’Giovanni. Photo: HammondCare
Training kitchen helps give
residents a more personal
connection with mealtime
and lets carers learn more
about taste and nutrition.
Peter Welfare interviewed
By Dallas Bastian
R
esidents have recently taken over an aged-care provider’s
training kitchen, forming a cooking club where they can
make their favourite foods, try out new recipes and share
elements of their culture with one another.
The club members are residents at Bond House, part of
HammondCare’s Hammondville site, and brought up the idea at a
residents meeting.
The Hammondville training kitchen was set up to support the
work of executive chef Peter Morgan-Jones and his team. It has
been hosting classes and workshops on preparing healthy and
appetising food for people with a range of different nutritional
and dietary needs, including those with dementia and swallowing
difficulties. But it has also been used to support a range of other
initiatives, including the cooking club.
Elizabeth Higgins, manager of Jones Hostel at the
Hammondville site, says each month, residents decide who will
be the head chef and provide recipes and a list of ingredients to
the main kitchen. They are then able to cook the meals and share
stories about food and family.
Higgins added: “They share stories of their childhood, their
cultural backgrounds and their family, and how they raised their
children. It just unites them.”
Residents Joyce Patze and Vincenza Di’Giovanni have been part
22 agedcareinsite.com.au
of the club since its inception and enjoy getting the chance to
socialise with others and discuss cooking and their families.
Di’Giovanni, a mother of four, has always loved cooking and uses
the club as an opportunity to share her Italian heritage with her
fellow residents. Patze says she enjoys being able to experience other
residents’ cultures through their cooking. Di’Giovanni agreed it helps
members learn more about one another.
Paula Babbage, manager of the Shaw and Poate residences
within Bond House, says other providers can add new kitchens
to their services to support their own cooking clubs but won’t be
able to truly replicate it without the right approach to care.
Peter Welfare, a head chef at HammondCare, adds that the club
was set up based on residents’ needs. “If you’re starting something
just based on what you think the residents might like, it will usually
flop. If you intend to do something based on what residents are
asking for, it tends to succeed,” he explains.
Here, Aged Care Insite sits down with Welfare to learn more
about the key elements of the cooking club and other ways the
training kitchen has been used.
ACI: Why was the training kitchen first set up?
PW: There are quite a few uses for this space. What’s unique to our
model of care in our cottages is that our care workers cook for a
small bunch of residents. They make the meals and the residents
can come in and help participate in that meal preparation. They’re
engaged in the process and it’s successful, particularly at looking
after people with dementia. It gives them plenty of prompts to let
them know it’s meal time and it gets their appetite going. By the
time the meal is served, they’re really ready to eat.
In Bond House, where we have built this training kitchen,
we already had a more traditional form of food service, with
a central kitchen. The meals are served in a dining room