Teaching kids to cook online was never on my list of things to do in 2020! I had plenty of other aspirations but that was certainly not one of them! However, as we all now know, 2020 has not turned out to be the year that we might have thought and many, many people have ended up doing things they never dreamed of doing or thought possible a mere few months ago!

Teaching kids to cook was always one of my aspirations but I always thought it would be in my kitchen or possibly a shed out the back of the house to start with. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think of doing it online! However, like so many people who saw their businesses decimated as a result of the lockdown and subsequent social distancing regulations, I saw the workshop side of my business fall off a cliff after the schools closed in March and had to rethink my plans for 2020!

My initial reaction after the announcement that the schools were closing (once I stopped crying knowing my own kids were going to be at home for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks…) was - what am I going to do for the parents that are both at home, working full-time with no childcare? Is there anything I can do to help them out? Maybe provide a bit of entertainment for the kids? Maybe do my workshops online?

And so it began … I started my free online workshops on the 16th March - a little 20 minute fun food workshop - a combination of some of the things I did with preschoolers and a bit of easy cooking. Feedback from my followers indicated that cooking was what most people were interested in so I upped the amount of cooking days until it was exclusively cooking every day. I ran the workshops for 14 weeks until the end of June with viewers from all over the world (disclaimer - my sister lives in Australia so she might have tuned in a couple of times …! but I also had viewers from the UK, USA, Germany and more). I completed more than 55 online workshops and had the crack!

The obvious transition was then to start offering cooking classes online. I started off with some friend’s children to test the waters (and my technology skills!). Zoom was not my friend for many weeks … as the sweat ran down my back while I tried to let people into the call and then it dropped and then I had to set up a completely new invite and resend it and so on and so on and so on. I finally mastered Zoom (I was not letting a piece of software get the better of me!) and got more practised at teaching my friends children how to make chicken goujons from scratch online. 

And a new string to my business bow was born! Are online cooking classes here to stay? Certainly they are for me at the moment but one thing this year has taught us all is that …. no-one knows what’s around the corner. I am so delighted to be bringing fun cooking classes with a sprinkling of food education into people’s homes all across the island of Ireland that I won’t be stopping anytime soon!

Check out upcoming classes here..