CONVENIENCE may be swaying people's decisions at dinner time but the Lockyer Community Centre is aiming to equip people to make better choices in the long run.

A block of workshops aimed at educating young families on how to make more nutritional and cost-effective choices when planning meals wrapped up in April.

LCC community development worker Linda Roberts said the project was a great success, achieving what the team intended.

Although the workshops were designed with young families on limited budgets in mind, participants came from a number of backgrounds.

"We ended up getting some older people who wanted to learn some cooking skills,” Mrs Roberts said.

"So we ended up broadening the scope of our target group because we found there was a need there.”

She said the program helped those with limited cooking skills to prepare nutritional meals for themselves and their dependants while reducing waste.

"We wanted to show them it's more cost-effective to cook at home than purchasing pre-packaged or processed meals,” she said.

"Our idea was to help them think outside the box and equip them to be able to save money by getting creative. Sometimes you have to make a meal from hardly anything.”

Mrs Roberts said planning ahead was key to making meals more cost-effective and could reduce the risk of impulse buying.

"I know people are geared for convenience and are time-poor,” she said.

"But a little bit of effort and a little bit of planning and forward-thinking can save so much money when it comes to food preparation and purchasing of food.”

One participant attended the workshops to learn tocook so he could care forhis wife.

"It was a bit of a role reversal, he was now the carer of his wife and he had never had to do the cooking,” she said.

"That provided him an opportunity to learn to cook and navigate a kitchen.”

A number of people and organisations came together to make the project a success.

The sessions took place in six two-hour sessions at Gatton RSL, with cooking classes led by Fiona Smith from Colonial Catering.

"I want to make a special thanks to Fiona from Colonial Catering, who did an amazing job with running the cooking sessions,” Mrs Roberts said.