• check for allergies and special diets as early as possible (get leader to ask when they make pre-camp phone call)
• ask the camper themselves for advice about possible hazards and suggestions for an interesting menu
• veggies
• don’t feed them cheese at every meal
• make use of pulses/beans
• if you’ve only got one, they may be quite happy with Linda MacCartney meals or some such
• check whether they like Quorn before feeding it to them – some veggies don’t like the texture of meat and hence don’t like Quorn
• vegan
• hummous is vegan – good for lunchtime
• use sunflower margarine instead of butter/marg in crumble, pastry etc – the result is not quite the same, but it does work
• nut allergy
• check the labels on even the most unlikely things e.g. pasta sauces, chocolate
• coeliac (gluten)/wheat allergy
• normal sausages aren’t suitable, get gluten free ones, and cook separately
• use a separate/clean chopping board when making sandwiches
• if you have a microwave, use it to do jacket potatoes
• gluten free pasta cooks much more quickly than ordinary stuff, and does not keep well
• they can usually tolerate oats e.g. porridge, flapjack

Basic Food Hygiene
 

• chopping board colours
• blue: fish
• red: raw meat
• green: fruit and veg
• yellow: cooked food
• white: dairy
• but the idea of different coloured boards is for commercial kitchens so they can be reused without washing up; I would suggest keeping red for raw meat and scrubbing well with dettox in very hot water straight after use, but otherwise washing boards between uses and not worrying too much
• filling the fridge (from the bottom up)
• fruit and veg in the salad drawer (but probably only salad stuff will be around long enough to need)
• raw meat on the bottom (solid glass) shelf
• cooked meat in the middle
• dairy on the top shelf
• try very hard to keep open milk bottles upright!
• decant things out of tins into a plastic bowl
• rice: throw away any leftovers, don’t try to reheat, or even keep to make rice salad
• cover everything, with lids, clingfilm, tinfoil or CLEAN tea towels
• wash your hands before cooking
• don’t lick your fingers
• tie back long hair
• wear an apron
• use a different utensil for each pot
• throw away used j-cloths every day
• change tea towels every day: keep a few out at a time
• tea towels can be washed by boiling in a saucepan with a little washing up liquid; rinse well and leave to dry
• if in doubt, chuck it out! don’t hang onto leftovers – they won’t get eaten!