What’s cooking in Wairoa? The classes that Gabrielle created

One of the meals tutor, food truck operator and caterer Donna Priestley will be teaching in Wairoa's new class for home cooking.

The need to rebuild a Wairoa kindergarten kitchen wrecked in the Cyclone Gabrielle floods has led to the establishment of a new series of cooking classes in the town.

The North Clyde Kindergarten, in Freyberg St, inundated in the flooding as the Wairoa River spilled over its banks, and was yellow-stickered.

The new design included an island bench in the kitchen to be more suitable in cooking for and serving the children, but it’s now going to double as a training kitchen for the EIT outreach centre.

An eight-week cooking course has started this week, with classes on Mondays, 3-5.30pm, tutored by “the orange truck” food truck proprietor Donna Priestley, with a focus on basic recipes to equip those in the kitchen at home to prepare healthy, affordable and quick meals for themselves and whanau.

EIT Tairawhiti Adult Community Education co-ordinator Bridget French-Hall, of Gisborne, said there has been “lots of interest” and even before the first day there were possibilities that in the future more courses, at different times, might be wanted.

“It’s never hard to fill a cooking class,” she said.

Numbers for each day will be limited, by the size of the kitchen, to 10-12 people, a number which doesn’t daunt Priestley, who started about five years ago operating from a gazebo, as a hobby while working in a supermarket as the day-job.

She never envisaged the growth, but eventually bought the truck, and started operating daily at the front gate of her family’s Wairoa home or elsewhere around town, in addition to gigs such as the Horse of the Year Show and Nest Fest, both in Hastings.

But, with a fulltime staff member in Wairoa, a part-timer in Gisborne and help from her husband, son and daughter, it’s also grown into a thriving catering, she said on Friday evening while preparing meatballs for 220 people at a gathering in Gisborne the next day.

The first day of the course would be akin to a meet and greet and some basics to help assess the needs of those taking part, she said.

Doug Laing is a senior reporter based in Napier with Hawke’s Bay Today, and has 51 years of journalism experience, 40 of them in Hawke’s Bay, in news gathering, including breaking news, sports, local events, issues, and personalities.