A COTSWOLD cook and her daughter have been helping feed frontline NHS staff at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

With lockdown came the cancellation of all of Hester Sale's summer catering jobs leaving her at a loss as to how to spend her time.

She said: “I thought, ‘How am I going to get through this?’ I am not one for doing nothing. Within a day I had hoovered my house so that no moth would ever dare go near it again and I certainly wasn’t going to sit in the garden and sunbathe.”

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A call from a friend, John Brownhill, who was setting up Food4Heroes, a scheme to deliver meals to doctors and nurses, solved her problem.

Within a week Mrs Sale, who lives in north Oxfordshire near Banbury, was catering on a scale she had never done before. She said: “Writing out a shopping list for 1,390 meals this week was quite an undertaking."

Mrs Sale is being helped by her daughter, Connie, 22, who is living at home having been furloughed from her job at an interior designer, in London, as well as a team of local volunteer cooks.

They made their first delivery to staff in the John Radcliffe’s theatre unit at the end of March.

Oxford Mail:

The Deputy Matron at the John Radcliffe theatre, Nicky Haigh, thanked Food4Heroes for arranging meals which can be eaten at lunchtime or taken home after a nightshift.

She said: “Your charity has made such a massive difference to boost the team morale and to spur them on to keep going. They are all getting very tired and quite emotional with it all, but they keep turning up the next day to do it all again.”

An Oxfordshire farmer donated 12 kg of silverside beef for Easter Sunday and Mrs Sale is hoping that other local suppliers will follow suit.

The food is prepared seven days-a-week in the Banbury-based independent school, Tudor Hall’s school training kitchen, where Mrs Sale usually runs a cooking club. They are also using the school’s van for deliveries.

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This week Mrs Sale and her team will be handing over the John Radcliffe catering to Peach Pubs, in Oxford, and turning their attention to delivering 150 meals-a-day to Banbury's Horton General Hospital.

Mrs Sale said she was 'delighted' to be giving something back to the nurses at the John Radcliffe and Horton Hospitals, who cared for her father in the last weeks of his life, including in intensive are. She said: "For me, this is another way of saying ‘thank you’ because we will always be in those nurses’ debt. Four of them came to dad’s funeral, which was very humbling. Dad adored them. We all adored them. They were phenomenal.”

If you would like to donate money so that Mrs Sale and her team can carry on cooking for NHS workers visit crowdfunder.co.uk/food4heroes-midlands-oxfordshire.

Follow Food4Heroes on Instagram at food4heroes1.