Easy Eats for Every1 kicks off

With our new Culinary Arts Coordinator in place, Meredith Schork, we have hit the ground running. Our project is layered with learning opportunities for both people we support and our DSPs.

We have launched Easy Eats for Every1, which is our take on Hello Fresh. It offers healthy meals available in one of three options:

• Heat and Eat – Ready for the microwave/oven.
• Prepped just Prepare – Everything is measured and chopped, it just needs to be  put together. Great for people who want to learn to cook but haven’t mastered some of the basics.
• From Scratch – Raw ingredients typical to the Hello Fresh model.

Each healthy meal kit comes with written instructions and a QR code to our Easy Eats for Every1 YouTube channel. Here, Chef Meredith provides a tutorial for people we support on how to prepare your kit. This allows anyone we support to try a healthy meal while working on skills for independent living.

All of this is done within our culinary classroom with those we support in Employment Services. Having a true demand for prepping, cooking, and portioning allows for authentic learning and work experiences.

Our first Easy Eats kit was 150 Thanksgiving meals for people we support. It was delivered to those living in the community that were alone for the first time, families that didn’t have the means to cook all the fixings, and to some of the folks and staff in our IRAs. The menu included: turkey breast, stuffing, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, green beans, roll, and homemade sweet potato pie.

We recently featured a two-ingredient pizza dough packed with protein. We have 50 people we support receiving the Heat and Eat option and 148 people receiving the Prepped just Prepare kits.

Recently, Community Prevoc made 1,200 cookies to be packaged into cookie kits just in time for the holidays. In addition to the traditional sugar cookie cut-outs, there was a gluten-free/vegan option.

We hope to continue this model and expand the kits being available to all the people we support and staff.