'Global Locals of Waimakariri' is a monthly social group fast becoming well known for its amazing cooking classes.
The social group has three main projects each year: Monthly meetings at the Plough to welcome new people to Waimakariri, an annual get-together with other groups to foster social friendship in the district and the now very popular series of multi-cultural cooking classes.
GLOW member and tutor for the night, Padi Nistala, says the group’s aim is to promote community connections through cultural events with food, song, music and loads of fun.
“We do have a lot of fun, and one of our most popular events is the Multicultural Cooking Class Series.
“Food is an amazing vehicle for people to come together.”
She says the group started planning the multi-cultural cooking classes in 2019 and they were sold out.
“We had such fantastic feedback, so we planned a bigger programme, but Covid put us on hold.
“This year because so many people were asking when the next series was beginning we restarted the programme and they are so popular we are pretty much almost sold out.”
She says winter was chosen to hold the series because not much else was on then and people have the time to come along after work and enjoy the experience as they cook and then dine together.
The Indian cuisine class Padi ran was the fourth in the weekly series held in the cooking classrooms at either the Rangiora New Life School or Kaiapoi High School.
Padi and her full class of 21 students learned how to combine many different spices to produce a garum masala spice to flavour a vegetable curry, which was served with spiced rice, when they later dined on their cooking.
As many of this year's series of 10 classes are close to being booked out, Padi advises people to go to events.humanitix.com and sign up early.
