Head chef reveals why she loves working for Cambridge Street Collective's new foundation

The Star, Sheffield

The Star spoke to Wendy O'Brien, the head chef at Blend Culinary Foundation (BCF), based at Cambridge Street Collective, to find out more about their cooking classes.

Transcript

00:00Everybody loves our classes and we have classes, we have our masterclasses and

00:06they're very popular. Our cooking and cocktails season we've done a summer,

00:13we're on our autumn and then we're going to host Christmas and winter and they

00:17are always sold out within a week beforehand so we have 18 people in here

00:22and they're all learning something fun and having cocktails and yeah it's a

00:28really really popular class. People always think that it's going to be a

00:32really complicated thing to make and then they're always astounded at how

00:35simple it is to make it yourself. So that makes me happy to know that somebody's

00:41going to go home and actually make that at home, it's not just a one-off, they're

00:45going to think right I'm going to make that now, so that's quite cool.

00:48For you, you've been involved with Cambridge Street since it opened I

00:53believe and your background is as a chef, so how does it feel for you or

00:58what was it that drew you into joining this? Well as a chef you spend all

01:05your life cooking for people who can afford to eat out at fancy restaurants. I

01:10trained at Le Gavroche in London which was the first three mission and star

01:15restaurant in England and people generally can't afford to eat in some of

01:21these restaurants but when you think about people who actually can't afford

01:25to eat, period, that's it, they're struggling, they can't feed their

01:30children and as a chef it's a great job, you're giving people pleasure but you

01:37you don't give back to the community, you don't really help

01:41anyone and it was just a way to be a chef and to also have the joy of

01:47actually helping people who really really need it and there's so many

01:51people out there that are living on the breadline and you know to be in a

01:56country like this and and realize that there are people on our doorstep who are

02:00starving, it's quite an upsetting thought to be fair, so yeah it was a no-brainer

02:05I absolutely love the idea of being able to do something, to do cookery classes

02:10but then in the same vein to do classes for people who actually otherwise would

02:15never be able to afford to do something like that and to get them in to do it

02:19for free, yeah it's just it's a lot of joy.

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