7 Cooking with Mr Dix

COOKING WITH MR DIX

By Jonathan Dix

I am the food teacher at Dartford Science and Technology College. As an ex-chef I have a passion for teaching students how to learn about the provenance of food, the seasonality, the skills involved in making food and finally how to create amazing, well balanced nutritious dishes.

When lockdown started at the end of March I was very conscious of trying to keep the students cooking. So I started a YouTube channel and Instagram account. The plan was to film some easy to do at home recipes having in mind that there were severe shortages of most things in the shops. Initially I also did a few Cook-a-long Live lessons via Instagram which were a great success. However going forward not everyone is available at the same time so decided to use Youtube as the main driver and Instagram more for information of what was coming up in the new videos.

So far the feedback has been amazing and I get daily emails from people who have watched the videos and cooked the dishes.

I was recently on BBC South East Today talking about the channel as part of a news item about lockdown learning.

I currently have around 660 subscribers for both the Instagram and YouTube channels and I have had 10,000 channel views in 2 months.

There are now 21 videos with dishes ranging from banana cake (a lockdown favourite!), old school orange rind cake to dinner party dishes such as tropical pavlova and chicken feuilletes. I now upload two videos a week – generally one sweet and one savoury. I often allow subscribers to vote using Instagram so will offer a choice of four things and they choose their favourite two!

I plan to carry on with the channel even when lockdown is all over as I enjoy teaching and if I can teach a few people how to cook then it is worth doing.

Please subscribe to the YouTube channel and Instagram: cookingwithmrdix If you would like to get in touch: cookingwithmrdix@gmail.com