Level 3: Go All Out for Animals

Teach a Vegan Cooking Class

PETA’s own Dr. Alka Chandna conducted vegan workshops for years and has written a guide to help others start their own. Her complete how-to booklet explains why and how to run a vegetarian workshop, complete with menus, recipes, sample public service announcements, and suggested talking points. To order this helpful booklet and free vegetarian starter kits for your class, please send us an e-mail message. The following excerpt was adapted from her booklet:

Planning Your Own Workshop
How do you set up your own hands-on cooking workshop? It’s as easy as (vegan) pie!

Step 1: Find a clientele that is willing to pay your price to attend the workshop. Post a few fliers in your local health food stores, and put an announcement in the community calendar of your local paper. Check out the response. Chances are, people will come flocking, but scope out your territory before you begin to work.

Step 2: Prepare a menu of 12 to 15 items. (Don’t worry—you won’t be doing any of the cooking!) The key is to create a menu that reflects the diversity of vegan cooking. Include a few entrées that are familiar to the Western palate. Dishes like vegan shepherd’s pie, vegetarian chili, baked beans, TVP-macaroni casserole, and vegan pot pie are sure winners. Also include some ethnic cuisine. Saffi, a variation on tabouli, is a refreshing Lebanese salad that uses a bulgur base. Chinese stir-fries and Indian curries allow workshop participants to become familiar with creating flavors and working with combinations of spices. Be sure to include several dishes that are low-fat, easy to prepare, and economical. The point of the workshop is to get participants to incorporate at least a couple of your dishes into their regular culinary routines. Finally, include dessert. The notion of egg-free, dairy-free chocolate cake is totally liberating to the health-conscious hordes that presently do without. Creamy vegan puddings and baked fruit cobblers are also crowd-pleasers.

When choosing recipes, be sure to take your kitchen into account. Don’t select more oven dishes than you can fit in the oven, and don’t select more stovetop dishes than you have burners. If you are selecting more than one oven-based recipe, make sure that they all call for the same temperature so that they can be cooked together in the same oven.

Step 3: Compile the recipes for the menu items that you’ve selected. Each recipe should serve between six and eight people. Compute a rough cost for the entire meal, add in your other expenses, and divide by the number of participants you expect. You should come up with a number between four and eight. This is the workshop registration fee.

Step 4: Set a time and date for the workshop. Saturdays or Sundays are usually best. Begin around 4 or 5 p.m. so that you can eat by 7 p.m. Then, begin registering your crowd. It is optimal to have between 12 and 15 people. If possible, insist on payment prior to the workshop to ensure attendance.

Step 5: The night before the workshop, go shopping. Buy all the ingredients for the spectacular meal that you’ve planned. Remember, you’ll be recouping your costs, so this part shouldn’t be painful.

Step 6: When the participants arrive, have all the ingredients and necessary utensils handy. Also, have photocopies of the recipes to pass out to the participants. Having nametags for your guests is a nice touch.

Step 7a: At this stage, there’s relatively little left for you to do. When everyone has gathered, take a few minutes to introduce yourself and explain why you do the workshops (never underestimate the value of personalizing an experience). If you wish, you can have a separate literature table, and you can either pass out the literature or invite people to have a look and help themselves. Then, go around the circle inviting people to introduce themselves and give a sentence or two describing what they expect from the workshop.

Step 7b: Divide the participants into groups of three or four, and assign to each group two or three items from the menu. Give each group a good assortment of dishes (one group shouldn’t be making all the salads, while another group makes all the main courses, and yet another makes all the desserts). Lead them to the kitchen, show them where everything is (you may even want to lay things out on the counter ahead of time), and stand back. As your workshop participants prepare the food, you can walk around and monitor the cooking, and make sure that everything is in order. People will probably ask questions, and you should certainly answer, but refrain from taking over the cooking process. Compassionate cooking workshops are designed to be hands-on experiences for the participants. Encourage the participants and offer compliments sincerely and liberally. It may be helpful to put two or three people in the monitoring role.

Step 7c: When everything is ready (some desserts may still be in the oven), pass out the plates and cutlery, and let the feast begin! Ask everyone to take only a small serving of each dish, since there will be so many dishes available for tasting. During the meal, invite each group to discuss the preparation of their dishes. Get feedback on the dishes themselves, and use what you learn to plan menus for your future workshops.

Step 7d: Some workshop participants will probably offer to help with the clean up. Accept their help. Many hands make for light work, and the sooner you can clean up after this workshop, the sooner you can begin planning the next one! Bon appétit!