Chef Joel Basumatari holds Capacity Building Workshop at Nongtraw, EKH

A cooking demonstration was held today at Nongtraw village by chef Joel Basumatari at Nongtraw village, East Khasi Hills district.

Basumatari, a member of the Slow Foods Chefs’ Alliance, holds a degree in Hospitality Management from Thames Valley University and also from the International Institute of Hotel Management (Kolkata). He has worked at the Crown Plaza London, Washington Mayfair and at the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai.

Chef Joel Basumatari during the cooking demonstration at Nongtraw community

The cooking demonstration was held under the theme ‘Enhancing nutritional diversity as a means of supplementing the mid-day meals (MDM) of primary school children using local resources’ as part of the ongoing GIZ project.

Community cooks of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) and Mid Day Meal (MDM) and other community members participated in the day-long workshop. The aim of the programme is to strengthen the initiatives on MDM through local resources in their own communities.

Ingredients used during the cooking demonstration

“It was a great experience to cook with the community members of Nongtraw. I am also learning from them at the same time and I hope to also incorporate this knowledge that I gathered,” Joel said.

Chef Joel Basumatari

Tharina Riahtam, a MDM cook, said, “It was a great learning experience from chef Joel who has shared these interesting ideas related with food. For example, he created two interesting dishes with tapioca today and I can’t wait to incorporate this and his other ideas in our MDM kitchen.”

Altogether chef Joel prepared a total of seven dishes, whereas the members of the community including the ICDS and MDM chefs prepared nine dishes.

Some of the dishes prepared during the cooking demonstration

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2 Responses to Chef Joel Basumatari holds Capacity Building Workshop at Nongtraw, EKH

  1. Bravo NESFAS Team. New initiatives are being reported on a daily basis which shows the amount of work that NESFAS Field staff are undertaking with participating communities and the amount of work that the small communications team of NEFAS is also keeping abreast with local initiatives. Thank you very much Alethea and Damika for the reporting and the excellent photographs.

    I love the display of the ingredients used for the demonstration. The cleanliness is particularly worth noting. Please note how shiny is the aluminium basin. This is a very Khasi and Jaintia tradition of scrubbing utensils until they sparkle. I hope the new GIZ funded steel tables displayed and used in this demonstration will also have that typical Khasi Jaintia sparkle and high standard of cleanliness.

  2. We are grateful to Chef Joel for his support. We are proud that we have a person of his calibre and training as our friend and guide. We will be doing more things with him in villages where our other partners are working.

    Thank you Joel from Bah Phrang and Kong Anita

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