A bucket full of flavours and fun

Creating hand-in-hand

Today I started my weekend with an exchange of WhatsApp messages between Little Princess, who is no longer so little, and a lady who works in the offices of our Association.

This social-media encounter was all about cooking and food, conductive living and learning.

Little Princess wanted me to send her all the photographs that I have of her cooking. and the lady in the office, Gudrun, wanted to hear all about what we cook and how the cognitive, reading skills and fine-motor skills and more, are all improving so much because the children can help themselves from the weekly grocery supply and create something for us all to eat. Which we off course do, with gusto!

Little Princess had a few new goals at the beginning of the year; one of them was to learn to cook.

Snippety-snip, chop-chop!

Gudrun's role is that every week she sends us a selection of fruit and vegetables that the Association is given.

The supermarket in the row of shops below our central offices usually throws out all the past-best green groceries on Monday morning. That was until our Association stepped in and now Gudrun goes downstairs and brings a shopping trolley full of food back with her. She sorts it before distributing it between the different departments who can put it to good use. The cook gets a share, the InBestForm inclusive cookery group for elderly clients gets a share, and we get some sent out to us in a big black bucket!   

My colleague Évi puts aside as much as she needs for the Conductive Cookery Group on Wednesday evening, this saves her a lot of money and time and also often determines what the group will cook as a side dish or dessert to accompany their chosen main course.

A rather full-of-apple apple-strudel

There is always a lot left for our children’s groups to use. Bananas are always popular as they form the base for many wonderful milk shakes and smoothies that the children love to mix and drink. This week there was a papaya in our bucket, a fruit that none of us had ever tasted before. We all tested a small piece before agreeing that it was delicious. Little Princess used the rest to mix the most delicious drink for us that she has ever made. She added a couple of strawberries and a banana, some milk and yoghurt and some flavouring. The taste of the papaya was the strongest coming through the slight vanilla taste from the vanilla sugar. The recipes all remain a secret until her milk-shake book is published. Her homework, and now also creative-cooking assistant, Annika, will be the co-author and editor, and I will translate it into English, maybe we can persuade Évi to translate it into Hungarian too.

Saving the successful recipe

Any of the bucket-full of produce that is left over at the end of the week is either frozen, pureed or put in the soup-maker.

After work on Friday Évi spent a peaceful ten minutes chopping beans and herbs to put into the freezer. While doing this we made plans for the following week coming up with ideas for the cooking group and for fine-motor programmes for all the children’s groups.

I hope that our lovely lady in the office, Gudrun, realises how much her care and attention to our greengrocery bucket influences the success of our work, how it eases our planning and saves us money, and how it motivates our children and adults to learn, to develop skills, to be creative and to learn about healthy eating.

I send Gudrun photographs and this morning explained to her some of the reasons we appreciate her time and consideration for organises our ‘bucket’.

Little Princess is going to cook her a meal one day soon to say thank you! 

Learning and living, a conductive lifestyle

"In the street cafés of Paris", June 2006
by Susie Mallett

Conductive Cooking

First published on conductor on:

Monday, 17 March 2008

I do not call this post Conductive Cooking only because when I cook with my clients it incorporates a standing programme, a sitting programme, a hand programme, maths, chemistry and whatever else cooking entails.

Of course the cooking includes all of the above and more, but this story about Conductive Cooking is as much about how we came to be cooking in the first place as it is about the actual physical activity of cooking.

I call it Conductive Cooking because of the conductive process which took place before the cooking could even happen, including the psychological changes which took place over the years, which are so necessary for this situation to have come about in the first place.

I have a group of adults with cerebral palsy, they have been coming to weekly conductive sessions after their work for many years now. During this time they have developed into more and more independent young people. They are very much aware that their parents don’t get any younger and therefore will not always be there to give assistance. This group is highly motivated, with a central aim of reducing their dependency on others.

I enjoyed working in the Petö Institute in the “Workers' Group” mainly because of the group "Seele", soul. I think that my evening group too has something of this atmosphere, it is very different to that of groups which take place during the day, during working hours!

"After Hours" groups are more like an evening class, not exactly a social gathering, but a coming together to learn something and at the same time meeting people and sharing experiences. We have all already worked a full day when we meet, then we have another two hours to get through. We are tired but none the less highly motivated. We have fun, we laugh a lot, we relax, we listen to classical music, we discuss everything under the sun and still seem to have time for a task series or two. All of it very conductive. All very much about living.

Now back to the cooking.

Last week I had an organisational problem, which meant starting the group thirty minutes later than usual. This was OK with all except one man who needed help with eating his evening meal and the late start would mean no help would be available.

Mária Hári often mentioned to us during our training how conductive education leads to spontaneity, activity and problem-solving and here I was on this occasion experiencing them all in a flash, in the space of less than five minutes.

A second member of the group, usually with a reserved manner, suddenly spoke up. Quickly and efficiently she solved the problem by suggesting that we cook that evening for her birthday, which would mean we could then eat in the group. This would mean that the man who needed help at his evening meal would receive help from us.

Between them, in the following five minutes they had the menu planned and the shopping and guest lists compiled.

A few years ago the woman who initiated this would not and could not have said 'Boo' to a goose, let alone have solved our dilemma!

Of course on the actual evening we did stand up to roll the pizza dough, we sat to chop the tomatoes finely, we walked to set the table and we bent down to reach in the oven, but the first conductive process took place in the weeks and years before, culminating in this perfect managing by the group of an unusual situation.

This is what I mean by Conductive Cooking.

The situation described demonstrates how it is the process of changes in the personality taking place through a conductive lifestyle, parallel to the physical changes, that makes it possible for Mária Hári's spontaneity, activity, problem-solving and, of course, the team work to take place.

The pizza, by the way, tasted wonderful!

http://www.susie-mallett.org/2008/03/conductive-cooking-i-dont-only-call.html