We love Cordon Vert Vegetarian Cookery school

Everything you need to know about Cordon Vert Vegetarian Cookery school 

       

Are you a vegetarian or interested in cooking a variety of vegetarian meals?? Cordon Vert Vegetarian Cookery school might have the right course for you! We caught up with Jonathan from the Vegetarian Society to find out more about the cookery school.

• Hi Jonathan, thanks for taking the time out to have a chat with us today. For our readers who've never heard of the Cordon Vert School, can you tell us a bit more about the cookery school?

The Cordon Vert Cookery School is part of the UK Vegetarian Society and as such we are the culinary expression of its aims and values. We want to inspire and support people to adopt and maintain a vegetarian lifestyle for the sake of animals, people and the planet.

• The school sound likes a fantastic initiative,  why was it set up?

 Although there have been cooking lessons at the vegetarian society for 40 years or more the cookery school wasn’t established formally until the early eighties. During that decade there was a flowering of interest in vegetarianism. Sarah Brown, who was the first vegetarian TV Chef was instrumental in getting the school off the ground. Food & cookery are fundamental to helping people adopt vegetarianism and the idea was to ride the wave of interest and further the vegetarian cause for individuals and professional caterers.

• So Jonathan, tell us about yourself and how long have you been a part of Vegetarian society?

Although I’ve been vegetarian for 34 years (“veganish for the past 17”) & been a member of the Society on and off over that time I’m relatively new having worked here since April 2014. Before that I had a vegetarian B&B in Tuscany and before that I had an organic vegetarian grocery and deli in North Yorkshire.

• Who is the cookery school aimed at?

The cookery school is for anyone who seriously wants to expand or improve their vegetarian repertoire. We run courses for catering professionals & the general public. For many years we’ve undertaken work with care home and hospital caterers to improve their offerings for vegetarian residents and patients. More recently we have been exploring ways of enabling people to do courses who otherwise wouldn’t. We’ve worked with young students from catering courses, deaf adults, learning disabled groups, food technology teachers and community development workers developing local food initiatives around healthy eating in low income communities.

• Check out the 5 reasons why people should book onto these courses?

1. We’re a serious cookery school with a good reputation. As founder members of the Independent Cookery School Association ( www.independentcookeryschools.co.uk ) you can be confident we are experts in our field.

2.   We have centres in Cheshire & London.

3. We put on around 130 courses a year aimed at catering professionals and the general public. We have a variety of offerings from foundation level veggie cooking to national cuisines, seasonal cuisines, vegan cookery, baking, evening classes and we are the home of the renowned Cordon Vert Professional Diploma.

4.We are working towards becoming a sustainable cookery school by ethical sourcing of organic, local and fairly traded produce & reducing our energy and water consumption

5.Our tutors are great and students have a lot of fun!

• How long are these courses and how do people book?

You can choose from 1 day, weekend or our 5 evening class series on courses aimed at the general public. Our intensive Diploma for Professionals lasts a week. All the courses can be booked on line at www.cordonvert.co.uk or by calling 0161-925-2015.

It was great speaking to you Jonathan. Now that I've discovered more about these classes I'll definitely be booking onto a course soon.