Ever since I heard about Thane Prince’s Cook Book Club in Islington, I thought it was a great idea. Being a bit shy I had put off attending and I wasn’t sure about taking food to complete strangers for their critique – I had a vision of something between Come Dine With Me meets Bake Off! But I had a great evening and plan to go again.

The concept for the Cook Book Club is simple: it’s a foodie social evening, each person brings some food to share and contributes to cover the cost of the venue. The themes or cook books change – I attended the ‘Wild’ night and took a rabbit pate, while other others took foraged fruit jam, bread and potted shrimps.

I raised on Twitter the idea of having a Cook Book Club in Walthamstow and so we launched the E17 Cook Book Club last week at Bygga Bo Cafe. After lots of interest we were worried that it would either be a dismal failure and no one would turn up, or we’d have too many people and run out of space! Thankfully, neither nightmare came true and we had a lovely group of people with a shared interest in food – quite a lot of which turned out to be cakes. Everyone brought along a favourite dish to share and a few bottles of wine helped the evening along.

So we’ve agreed the theme for the next E17 Cook Book Club is ‘Spanish’ and we will be meeting up on Wednesday 28th January 2015 – venue to be decided, everyone is welcome to join us. Again, it will be bring a dish and maybe the recipe or cook book. The plan is to meet every 6 weeks and for it to be … well… fun!