One of the things I loved doing before I experienced my sight loss a few years ago was cooking. I learnt a lot of recipes from my mum growing up and once I’d moved out of my parents’ house I had a lot of fun trying out new recipes or returning to the meals I’d had from my childhood and putting my own spin on them. I collected cookbooks from charity shops and the bookshop I worked in, and I loved flipping through them and displaying them in my kitchen. Once I lost my sight, I spoke to a social worker who was helping me adjust and she basically told me that I should throw my cookbooks out because I wouldn’t be using those anymore and all I’d ever use is the microwave. While I was in the early days of learning how to navigate with my new limited vision, I was pretty annoyed! I believe very passionately that if you have the right support and adaptations, a visually impaired person should be able to do anything a fully sighted person can do. So, I ignored this woman completely, and with a couple of hacks I gathered from the internet and trial and error, I kept cooking. I’m not going to pretend that some things I don’t need help from my boyfriend or my family, but I still cook the same recipes, and they taste just as good as when I did them before!
Before I share my tips with you, I’m sticking big ol’ health and safety warning sticker all over this post though in that these tips are just ways that I’ve adapted the way I cook since my visual impairment and if you don’t feel comfortable or safe doing these things please don’t! I can’t afford any lawsuits if you burn yourself or slice anything unintended. Cooking’s meant to be fun! Here we go…
1 Keep your kitchen organised
Starting with an obvious one, but when you know exactly which utensils live in which drawer, it really does make life a lot easier. This is true just generally and doesn’t really have anything to do with eyesight, but why set yourself up and struggle finding things?
2 Use bright kitchen utensils to provide contrast
I treated myself to a new set of knives and a new set of chopping boards once I lost my sight. With bright coloured handles and blades, even if I can’t tell you which colour each knife is, I can tell them apart and most importantly keep the blades away from my fingers! The coloured chopping boards also help provide contrast when you’re slicing things and make it easier to see where needs cleaning.
3 Use dark coloured paper or a high contrast colour behind a clear jug to measure liquids
Even with full eyesight sometimes I struggled to see the level of water in a measuring jug, or stop myself from overfilling a glass, but it turned into a bit of a nightmare after my sight loss unless I realised this easy trick if you still have some vision. If you’re pouring water into a measuring jug, get a black piece of paper (or a bright coloured chopping board) and hold it behind the glass to up the contrast and help you tell when you need to stop. It took me longer than it should to work that one out. I also have a water level indicator that I sometimes use, which you hook over a glass and it’ll vibrate once the water reaches its level. I don’t use it that often though, because ironically I leave the device lying around my kitchen and then it’s quite hard to find!
4 Use measuring cups and spoons for flour, sugar and spices
I used to use these sometimes before, but with full eyesight it was often a lot easier to judge how much flour or paprika to put into a dish by eye. Sometimes I will still wing it, but especially when you don’t want to end up chucking half a packet of chilli powder into your dinner, it’s sometimes better to get yourself a dedicated set of measuring spoons and learn by touch which one you need. A lot of them will have the measurement etched into each spoon so you can feel for the specific measurement.
5 Stick puffy stickers on your most used hob, microwave or oven notches
Okay this one I have to give full credi to my social worker for, because I don’t do this, but it may be useful to you. If you know that most food you cook needs a medium heat, or is at 200°c, get a pack of 3D puffy stickers (the RNIB sells them, or you can get some cute ones from Paperchase or similar). Stick them near the notch you need, so you can feel where the dial needs to be turned to. Remember to stick one near the ‘off’ position as well, because leaving hob rings on can only lead to trouble!
6 Invest in a halogen oven and/or a microwave
Depending on the sort of cooking you want to do, getting a cooker like a halogen or microwave that is a sealed unit you can control electronically and don’t have to worry about whether or not it’s the correct temperature could be invaluable. I still use my electric oven and hob and I don’t tend to cook a lot of meals in a microwave, but it is really useful for cooking things like rice, which you can steam in a microwave in about 8 minutes without having to worry about water overboiling. A halogen oven sits on your worktop in a similar way, but you can use it to cook almost anything in, including bread and roasts. I think both of these devices are potentially a lot safer than a traditional oven for cooking dinners once you learn how they work.
7 Use Be My Eyes app on your phone and let a volunteer help
There is a really cool app called Be My Eyes that allows people with visual impairment to connect with sighted volunteers using an iPhone camera, and you can use this to ask sometime to help tell you what expiration dates are on things, or if the utensil you’re looking for is in the drawer or on the washing up rack. Hopefully they’ll bring this out for Android users soon as at the moment it’s iPhone only but it’s worth checking out!
8 Use an image to speech app or scan your recipes in
If you have a lot of paper recipes and cookbooks you can try and find their equivalents on Pinterest or recipe websites, but if you have a very specific recipe you want to use and nothing else will do, you can always try downloading an image to speech app onto your phone, take a picture of the recipe and use the app to convert it into text that can be read by VoiceOver or another screen reading device. It’s a bit fiddly, but sometimes needs must.
9 Swap complicated recipes for simple foods enhanced with spices and herbs
I really think if you like cooking, or even just like food generally, investing in different kinds of spices really is the best thing you can do to give you cooking options. You can make even a plain chicken breast completely different by using Cajun spices or by giving it a herby crust, and they can be used in lots of dishes rather than for just one thing.
10 Cook with your loved ones
Cooking is so much more enjoyable when you’re cooking for someone you love, but it’s also a lot of fun to cook together either with your partner or with a grouo of friends for a dinner party. You might not be able to do this every day, but if you’ve got some new recipes you want to try, or you feel like baking some cupcakes, why not invite your friends around to help out? You can use them mercilessly for labour help, and they get paid in food. It’s a win-win scenario.
So those are my ideas for how to keep cooking with a visual impairment. I appreciate that no two sight loss stories are the same, so some of these tips may not be as helpful to you as they might be for me, but the overall message here is that you shouldn’t have to give up something you enjoy because of your disability, and sometimes when it seems impossible really the first step to making it work is trying something new. You can follow me on Instagram where I often share my latest cooking adventures, I’d love to hear what you’ve been cooking recently!