Cooking Blind: People try to imagine how it must be for a ‘blind cook’ to pour boiling liquids into small containers, deal with hot oil in a sizzling pan or reach into the depths of a scorching oven. Challenging?
‘Wine and cheese are ageless companions, like aspirin and aches, or June and moon, or good people and noble ventures.’ M
M.F.K. Fisher
Now imagine not one but TWO ‘blind’ cooks in the same kitchen! Exciting!
Cooking Blind : A Taste of the World
About two years ago, I had the honour to share a kitchen with ‘Baking Blind’ cook from UK, Penny Melville Brown, chef extraordinaire, when she came to film the occasion in my home in Melbourne.
Penny had been selected as one of three winners of the Holman Prize; an initiative of the Lighthouse Foundation for the Blind and Visually Impaired based in San Francisco, which funds three blind or vision impaired individuals each year to pursue their ambitious dreams.
For the inaugural award in 2017, Penny won the judges hearts with her Baking Blind’ initiative. Over the course of a year, she travelled to six continents to work alongside other cooks and chefs and filmed her baking adventures in the hope of changing people’s assumptions about the capabilities of people living with blindness or low vision.
‘When we have the same enthusiasms, whether it is food, work, music, sport or anything else, we can come together as equals. If we can manage to cook like everyone else, there’s no limit to what else we can do too.’
Penny Melville Brown
Cooking Blind: Red Hot Cooking
The day arrived to cook with Penny, and it was an incredible feeling having forged a friendship through our email correspondence – to share our passion for cooking and to organise how we would make it all work on the day. We even wore the same colour without realising it at first.
Now you can watch the show where we chopped, chatted and cooked, and share our thoughts on being cooks who enjoy baking without sight!
Huge thanks to Penny and her film crew: Toby and Alan…and keep an eye out for a cameo appearance by two members of the Lollipops!
WATCH:
READ: the original article on VisionAware:
Two Blind Cooks
COMING SOON!
A sample chapter, ‘Cooking in a Tactile Kitchen’ from my book, ‘Blindness for Beginners: a renewed vision of the possible’ narrated by Alice Hermans.
You might also like:
Listen to Cooking Blind in a Tactile Kitchen (Part One)
Copyright © Maribel Steel 2019