Thanks to the Portuguese National Youth Council (Conselho Nacional de Juventude) 25 Europeans were able to gather in the charming city of Lisbon to learn how to cook healthily. Besides the Portuguese, Youth Councils from three other countries took part in this training course: Romania, Italy and Greece. Zlatko Djordjevic, content manager of the Health4Youth project, was there as well and this is his report.
Only one of the delicious results
Whenever we start thinking about healthy food, our very first thoughts go to fruits, vegetables, fish… But how often do we think of how to prepare them? How much the preparation methods can influence the nutritional composition of the fish, vegetables, fruits? These are the questions that we tried to find answers to.
The participants were divided into six teams, and each had a task: to prepare one course for lunch, either soup, salad, meat, fish, dessert or bread. We received the recipes and our goal was to prepare it with a low budget, and in an easy and healthy way!
They all started from the beginning: learn how to choose good food! So we visited the Market of the 31st of January (Mercado de 31 de Janeiro). The chefs from the famous Fabian Bernardino’s team “Travel & Flavours” were there for us! They taught us how we can distinguish if the fish is fresh or not – for example by observing the colour of the fish’s eyes and gills, and also by checking if the scales are jelly or smooth.
Concentration from the participants
When we bought all we needed, our next step was to learn how to cut the food in the most practical way and in the same time with the lowest possibility to get injured. A lot of techniques were presented to us, and none of us knew of them before! The cooking was always taking a lot of time, but that is quite normal as we were making lunch for 35 people.
And after the nice meals we had, we also needed some physical activity! The combination of dancing and laughing that is Zumba, was just perfect for us. Jogging along the river Tejo, made us feel like we were real inhabitants of Lisbon, enjoying the magnificent sunset instead of tourists.
We spent the evenings with discussions on how to spread word about healthy lifestyles and healthy habits once we would come back home. And we concluded that it is not important how big our projects back home will be , but that the message we are going to share is: Knowing how to eat is knowing how to live!
Written by: Zlatko Djordjevic, Health4Youth