Iowan starts cooking magazine for people with disabilities

If you stop into Plymouth Grounds Coffee Shop, the coffee shop at Plymouth United Church of Christ, you'll see a bit of Sue Hoss' work in action. The shop is used as a job-training site for Ruby-Van Meter students with intellectual disabilities and was started by the church with Hoss' help. Hoss is a congregation member and also partner in Main Dish Media, a local food media company.

Hoss, who has an intellectually disabled sister, works with the students, giving baking lessons; the treats they turn out are sold at the shop. "They've really enjoyed it," Hoss said, "and they want to do more cooking." That got Hoss' wheels turning and led to the development of "Look, Cook, and Eat," a digital how-to cooking magazine designed for those with intellectual disabilities, to help promote an independent lifestyle. Subscribers will pay a small yearly fee, $20 to $25 or so, Hoss said. She and her team launched a Kickstarter campaign on July 14 to raise $45,000 for the project, which is hoping to debut in mid-2015. The campaign goes until midnight on Aug. 28

She did some research, looking for cookbooks or other opportunities for this demographic to learn to cook, and found very few. "This is a market that is not served well. There are cooking curricula, but nothing designed for the avocational cook."

Everything about the magazine is designed to be simple and easily navigated. The recipes are basic, and keep nutrition in mind. "A lot of people who live on their own tend to resort of processed, prepackaged meals and frozen dinners. We want to offer a more healthful alternative," Hoss said. Because motor skills could be an issue for potential subscribers, "many of the recipes will call for canned items – like tomatoes or beans – and some packaged things like precooked rice, rotisserie chicken" or products like Simply Potatoes, in order to minimize knife handling and other fine-motor-skill tasks. "Even with these, I think anything mostly homemade is going to be healthier."

Hoss said that when people hear about the project they mention other demographic groups who might benefit, especially in an age where cooking is often a skill that goes unlearned at home. College students, widows or widowers who suddenly have to take over cooking duty, young professionals who've never had to cook. There's even a market, Hoss said, to be found in the people who work with people with disabilities. "A lot of times, they go into a home to help, but they don't know the first thing about cooking either."

Most of the information will be offered in a visual and audial format to accommodate different reading levels, showing lots of photographs, along with videos of each step of the process in making a dish. The model is also interactive, "as opposed to someone just standing there telling them what to do," Hoss said. It includes an "ask a friend" feature, which will lead cooks to a video of a peer giving them more information.

Each recipe is broken into sections like "buy this," "use this" and "cook" (the actual wording may change as the product goes through development). In the "buy this" section, cooks will find a list of ingredients as well as a photo of each. The "use this" section offers a list of the necessary kitchen tools, again with photos. The "cook" section will have several short videos – illustrating each step – along with pop-up list of the ingredients with measurements, so subscribers don't have to click back and forth between screens.

"Our hope is to develop a usable, functional, fun way to learn to cook and to develop a following," Hoss said. We'd love to hire people with intellectual disabilities to help us create this – to work in the test kitchen, to do photography, help us do videos. There is a lot of room to create job opportunities."

For more information:

Find "Look, Cook, and Eat's" on Facebook.

Plymouth Grounds Coffee Shop is open to the public, 8:30 a.m. to noon, Monday - Friday