A panda outing to creATE workshop

This week, the pandas had a mini adventure to a new kind of cooking workshop, managed by the wonderful Meredith. Founder of ‘Food at Heart’, Meredith has a passion for home cooking and discovering great food experiences. With pizza and creativity on the brain, we donned our finest aprons as we geared up for the cre-ATE workshop. 

So, what was it all about?

The aim of the workshop was to tap into our creative energy before unleashing all of this onto a blank canvas – in this case the canvas was lovely pizza dough! Our approach to food has become a routine - we have our regular lunchtime haunts near our place of work, while dinner might be a rushed chore after a long day.

What Meredith wants to do, is brush all of these habits aside and approach food with a clear mind. 

MMM

Meditation – movement – mindfulness. These techniques can be used for all creative tasks, to clear your mind and allow the creativity to flow.

Be open to risks, try something new and collect your thoughts. These are just a few of the many tips the pandas picked up as we approached our first task – blind tasting. It was amazing to see how you react to food when you can’t see it! Something you enjoy eating might feel a bit weird to touch alone. Tapping into your senses is extremely important in the creative journey, as the pandas learned. 

Panda highlights

Soon came the time where our creative thoughts were made into tasty treats. Firstly, we split into two groups: team salad and team dessert. Each team created a dressing for either the carrot salad, or the pear dessert. Risks were certainly taken, as we threw chilli flakes into honey and juiced one lemon too many (the dressings tasted AMAZING!)

Then it was pizza time as we chose our ingredients and prepared our dough (shout out to Neil’s daring stuffed crust, Yasmin’s perfect circle and Kathryn's courgette architecture.) It can be tricky, but having used all the techniques it was a fun and stress free creative session. With an open mind, you can certainly try new things and have fun experimenting. We suppose you’re wondering how our pizzas tasted? Well they were tasty, fresh and full of creative flavour.

What the pandas learned

As mentioned, the techniques could be applied at any time in your daily routine. As for the pandas, we consider ourselves imaginative influencers who use our knowledge and openness to find the best solution for those we work with.

We think there is definitely a place for the cre-ATE workshop tips in what we do, and believe it can help anyone open their minds up to many possibilities. Watch this space! Find out more about Meredith and ‘Food at Heart’ right here!

A great evening was had by all the pandas, so a big thank you to Meredith! We'll see how our attempts at home pan out...

Who said pandas can't cook? For more posts about life as a panda, take a look at our panda news posts.