Healthy Cooking Made Easy with BBC Good Food

Who is the course for?

This course is for anyone who wants to learn how to regularly cook healthy meals.

This may include:

Healthy eating enthusiasts: you love healthy foods and cooking regular meals but want to achieve better balance in your eating habits.

Family cooks: you want to know how to nourish your family with balanced meals, and get tips for simplifying healthy cooking.

The nutrition-curious: you want a deeper understanding of how food impacts the body and our overall wellbeing. You’re excited by health trends, but want to better understand the fundamental elements of nutrition and diet.

Home cooks in training: you’ve mastered the basic cooking skills like boiling pasta and preparing meat and vegetables but you want to create new healthy and balanced meals.

Students: You want to go beyond pot noodles to support your health and energy. With tight budgets and limited equipment, you need simple techniques and fool-proof meals that you can turn to again and again.

What topics will you cover?

Healthy cooking made easy covers nutrition basics such as nutrients and calories, health benefits of key ingredients and equipment required to create simple healthy meals in just five weeks – including a stir-fry, curry, traybake, pasta and fish dish.

Each week, you’ll learn how to master a new healthy meal to add to your kitchen repertoire. The classes start with the very fundamentals of healthy eating, including understanding and identifying the key foods that support your health and why. As you work your way through the course, you’ll build on this knowledge, learning how to easily identify food groups, plan ahead and create delicious, balanced meals in minutes.

Each class involves an investigation into your ingredient benefits and their purpose in your meal

an exploration of what learners already know, kitchen equipment and ingredient know-how, as well as how to anticipate, eliminate and troubleshoot potential failure points i.e. food storage, equipment and leftovers. Each class ends with a new recipe to make and a supplemental recipe to experiment with further, plus links to a collection of recipes that might prove useful in the future.

This course also includes:

How to properly identify macronutrients i.e. protein, fats, carbs

Understanding micronutrients and their sources

Creative ways to achieve your 5-a-day

The benefits of colour and savvy seasonings in your meals

How to achieve balance in meals

The kitchen equipment basics

Our favourite cooking techniques for preparing healthy meals

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to…

Discuss key nutrition terms such as calories and nutrient-density

Classify micro- and macronutrients

Explore how nourishing ingredients will help you to achieve nutritional balance in your meals

Identify useful kitchen equipment for easy meal preparation

Create five healthy recipes and attempt variations to suit your tastes