THE Easy Peasy cooking bus has been visiting local school in the Marches border area and Wales to give the children a day of cooking workshops.

Funding has been secured by Mortimer Country Food Fair’s 'loving local food’ project, which has been funded by the Big Lottery Fund’s Awards for All programme. The first school visits have been to Clunbury and Bucknell Primary school as and then on January 29 they visited Knighton Primary School. In Wales the visits also form part of the Healthy School's Programme.

The project aims to promote local fresh produce and to encourage children and young people to cook using locally produced ingredients. “We are blessed with the best local food and drink in the area” said fair director Carolyn Chesshire, who also runs the well known Lower Buckton Country House, and is passionate about growing and cooking local, fresh food. She added “The Food Fair at Brampton Bryan helps to promote local food producers and we are delighted that the lottery funding has meant we can take this message out to local school's with Easy Peasy Cookery”.

Easy Peasy, mobile cookery school is a CIC based in Ludlow and run by Tish Dockerty with a hands-on cooking from scratch focus on healthy eating and cooking local seasonal vegetables within a budget.

At Knighton Primary school 60 year five and six children including members of the school's healthy eating council all had the chance to make and cook either pizzas or apple muffins and learned a lot about local produce, healthy eating as well as a variety of cooking and food preparation skills.

Further Easy Peasy Lottery funded workshops have also been arranged for schools in the Mortimer Country area of Powys and North Herefordshire in the next few months, and Easy Peasy will be at this years seventh annual Mortimer Country Food Fair on July 12, held at Aardvark Books in Brampton Bryan, which will also welcome TV chef James Strawbridge on a sustainable theme.

For more information www.easypeasycookery.co.uk or www.mortimercountryfoodfair.co.uk.