Salt and pepper chips, ‘better than a Chinese takeaway’.
In this week’s therapy session we made salt and pepper chips adapting a recipe from the BBC Good Food website. The presentation might not be Michelin Star level, but we had lots of fun, worked on some essential life skills and our client thought the end result ‘tasted better than a Chinese takeaway’.
Through cooking activities, individuals can learn to follow instructions, solve problems, and make predictions and observations. This is why kitchen related tasks are often used in Occupational Therapy with individuals who have experienced a brain injury.
The young client has both cognitive and motor impairments, including a decreased information processing speed and executive function difficulties. In the context of cooking this impacts on his ability to plan and prepare meals and drinks. Creating and cooking meals that the client loves, like salt and pepper chips, increases his engagement and want to do the therapy task, because it is something that is meaningful to him. He finds the outcome actively rewarding, especially the eating part! For what may seem like an outwardly simple task, OT is using his enjoyment within cooking to help implement a therapy plan to address some of his cognitive and physical difficulties.
These techniques can then be carried over to other tasks in his everyday life, including;
– providing education on pacing/fatigue management
– environmental set up
– one-handed techniques/the use of adaptive equipment to help in areas of difficulty e.g. chopping board with spike
– working on the cognitive skills of planning, initiating, problem solving, maintaining attention and prospective memory.