Home »
Taste the Good Life is an ongoing joint community project between Carmién Tea, TEEKANNE and the Mouton Foundation.
The latest phase of the project is a cooking competition aimed at promoting healthier diet choices amongst our farm communities and getting them excited about cooking healthier meals for themselves and their families. We’ve done this by launching a virtual competition where prizes will be given to community members and families that lose the most weight by the end of the competition period.
Boxes filled with healthy ingredients are supplied to households every two weeks with instructional videos by celebrity chef Carmen Niehaus, on how to prepare these meals, as well as tips on how to measure the ingredients correctly and what a balanced, healthy plate should look like. More than one person per household can enter, giving the whole family a chance to learn more and create their own healthy and delicious meals.
All videos have been created in Afrikaans, the home language of the participants, to allow them to easily understand the instructions, ingredients and measurements. The videos are sent out to community members on a weekly basis via a WhatsApp group at low file sizes, to allow easy viewing and downloading where public wifi is not available and the cost of data is high. Wifi was however made available at selected buildings in the community, allowing entrants to easily access the necessary information.
The boxes filled with healthy ingredients are handed out to 90 families every two weeks, a total of four boxes per family, for the duration of the competition. With these ingredients, they receive an instructional video and are then tasked to recreate these recipes at home. A recipe booklet was also handed out to the families with even more recipes included, to help them cook healthier meals even after the competition ends.
The boxes included ingredients for:
Week 1: Four Bean Salad & Rooibos Ice Tea
Week 2: Chicken & Rice Skillet Dish
Week 3: Thirty Day Muffins
Week 4: Curry Mince
Entrants have been having fun with creating these delicious recipes and have been keeping us updated with videos of themselves cooking or photos of their final creations. Based on feedback we’ve received so far the competition is doing really well, with someone having lost 8 kilograms already! Everyone’s getting excited for the final weigh-in at the end of May, after which the winners will be selected and announced. Participants are encouraged to keep practising good eating habits by using the recipe booklet supplied to them at the start of the competition, which includes a variety of healthy recipes.
Keep an eye out for our next update when the winners are announced!