As lockdown enters its 14th week, the Brigade is offering the nation a ten-week YouTube course on cooking nutritious, cheap and tasty meals to help maintain a healthy diet – and steer us away from the processed foods that many of us fall back on to get us through a time of huge stress.
London Fire Brigade’s own nutritionist Greg Lessons has made ten, five-minute videos, showing how to cookup a different delicious meal at home. Each one comes complete with a rundown of ingredients and quantities needed, clear instructions, and nutritional information about the meal. You can choose to cook along to the videos, or simply follow the written recipe on the video’s description.
Award winning Greg Lessons is a former firefighter, who retrained to become the first dedicated nutritionist to be employed at a fire and rescue service. Greg has chosen ingredients easily found in any local supermarket, and designed meals to be easy and quick to cook. Whether cooking alone, or for a hungry brood, or sharing the video on a virtual cook-along with friends as a fun way to keep in touch, there’s a chance to refresh week night staples and try out something new.
Try Greg’s kedgeree with turmeric and bay for a special weekend breakfast; his masala omelette with green peppers and garam masala for a quick home-working lunch; or there’s an end-of-shift supper with his sea bass curry with ginger and chickpeas for a satisfying dinner; not forgetting his pea, leek and onion soup for a feel-good freezer batch cook-up.
Greg Lessons said: “To stay healthy in lockdown is a real challenge, whether you’re working at home, or like our firefighters, you’re out there sustaining London’s essential services. We all need to avoid the health pitfalls associated with staying home more. In lockdown, we all need to consume meals that are nutritious and not too calorific - not just for our physical health, but just as importantly, for our mental health, which lockdown is testing in all of us like never before”.
He continues:“With my ten-week #lockdowncookbook you’ll see how, with a little planning, you can mix it up with healthy meals that taste great and aren’t complicated - cooking with basic ingredients and minimising ultra-processed foods.”
Watch the full playlist of Greg’s three to five-minute #lockdowncookbook cook-alongs at London Fire Brigade’s YouTube channel. Please share with friends, family and colleagues, and let us know which recipes you enjoyed by sharing photos with us on Twitter @LondonFire, at Instagram /londonfirebrigade or on our Facebook page using #CookingwithGreg.