Our August get together attracted by far the most people ever seen at our meetings. Hardly surprising since it was an Indian Cookery Demonstration and Workshop! Anita Sharma-James of The Spice Trade showed us how to make vegetable pakoras, then everyone had a go themselves and spent all evening sampling the delicious results!

Click here for a full report and see our gallery of photos from the evening.


A total of 29 people filled St Georges Community Hall for what was our most enjoyable meeting to date. People came from as far away as Birmingham, Coventry and Solihull, but the large majority were from Redditch. 9 of the total had never been to an RVV meeting previously and most of those we had not even met before!

The evening started with Anita demonstrating the simple steps of preparing the pakora mixture. Whilst the pakoras were deep frying in the kitchen, the workshop began! 20 of those present split up into 7 groups and set about following Anita`s instructions and recipe. There`s no better way of getting to know your fellow veggie/vegans than by helping each other to hone your cookery skills!! With a little advice from Anita where necessary, all groups managed to successfully prepare their pakora mixture. The frying stage became something of a bottleneck, but each group waited patiently for their pakoras to be deep fried to perfection! Throughout the evening until 10pm, there was a steady supply of delicious Indian delicacies for all to tuck into!! Anita also prepared some mint chutney for those that wanted an extra tang to their Indian snacks. Click here to download the recipes for both the pakoras and the mint chutney.

The Spice Trade offers Indian cookery courses and demonstrations as well as catering for dinner parties and special occasions, allowing clients to sample and try their hand at home-cooked Indian food. Anita, who is vegetarian herself, runs the courses and workshops either in her own home or at the client`s house. Click here to see a double page spread of Anita in action, inside the North Worcestershire magazine `The Village`! (scroll to page 30-31)

Inbetween the cooking, sampling and getting to know each other, everyone took advantage of the various other attractions at the meeting. As ever, there was a steady trade all evening at Red Kite Health Foods stall. This month, there was a second stall of chocs, cosmetics, gifts and other goodies, all sold in aid of the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research. Masses of free nutrition factsheets, recipes and magazines were taken away and several veggie/vegan related books were borrowed from our very own `library`.

Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the evening, many people made new friends and the newcomers promised to return. As practical cookery demos and workshops seem to be so popular, we plan to have more in the future, keep an eye on the forthcoming events!

For more photos from this event, see our gallery