NCBI’s Come Dine With Me Experience
By Anne Maria Hennessy
NCBI’s Community Resource Workers in Cork, along with Billy our volunteer, decided to set up our own version of the hit series when it was on air during the summer. We wanted to run an activity with a peer support element, as service users had told us that they would like the opportunity to meet with others who also had sight problems. We also wanted an activity that would give people the opportunity to use skills they were no longer using to their full extent as a result of their sight loss. Since the Irish version of Come Dine With Me began in Cork, and was a huge success, we felt we were on a winner!
Cooking for strangers — in a strange kitchen!
Five service users took part in the first “series”, Roberto Vercellino, Anne Moloney, Elaine O’Neill, Seamus Kelly and Deirdre Dorman. There was a level of apprehension as well. It can be nerve-wracking cooking a meal when your vision isn’t very good, and even more so when you are cooking in a strange kitchen. But add to that the element of cooking for strangers, and further compound it by turning it into a competition … well you can see why people might have been a little worried.
The series ran over five weeks, with each service user cooking two courses. The person who was cooking would come into NCBI early in the morning and the other four participants would arrive at 1pm for their meal. They all looked forward to coming to Ballincollig on a Wednesday and as the weeks went on the menus became more and more elaborate.
The winner was Elaine O’Neill-Slattery, who cooked chicken tandoori as well as kitchiree, a spicy rice dish. The Clarion Hotel in Cork sponsored a prize of a meal in their restaurant. All the competitors agreed that the competition was only part of it. They gained so much in terms of increased confidence in their ability to cook a meal from scratch and in their ability to host a dinner party. They also felt that they received so much encouragement from each other to try to learn new skills, such as IT skills, mobility skills and rehabilitation skills.