Roshni is a Self-Advocate with a Mission to Feed!

Roshni Kashyap was born to make food. The young woman with Down syndrome started a chutney business and is poised to launch a cookbook. However, she has many other talents and her whole life to explore them. Including publishing a book of poetry. Available on Amazon is Don't Forget You're Beautiful.

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

Roshni is a Self-Advocate with a Mission to Feed!

 

00:04

Hello and welcome to another edition of DDA's podcast, Encouraging Abilities. I am your host, DDA Communications Manager, Evan Kelly. Now lately we've been talking a lot about inclusion and accessibility with a variety of interviewees, but today we're chatting with a very interesting young lady, her name is Roshni Kashyap, to be clear, and I got this from your website. She likes to be called Rosh for short. So that's so much easier for me. Now Rosh is a self advocate with Down syndrome.

 

00:33

who is building a chutney empire. Food is in her blood. She's been cooking with her mom for as long as she can remember and completed the food service careers program at Vancouver Community College. Since then has launched three different chutneys and even wrote a book on her. Now on her website, she says, and I really like this, they say I have Down syndrome, but that doesn't get me down. That's such a wonderful outlook on life. Welcome to the podcast, Rosh. Thank you.

 

01:03

So tell us a little bit about how you started being involved with cooking. I had a passion of cooking since I was a little girl. And ever since then, I've seen my grandmother and my mom, like, be in cooking. And that's how I actually loved cooking. Now, do you come up with your own recipes? Are they somewhat sort of passed down from family members?

 

01:28

Actually when it comes to um, my chutney business, I actually had some help come up with my recipes Can you tell me a little what how do you settle on the final ingredients of these recipes? I'm every ingredient actually um, so I do get it from a wholesaler and sometimes I have at home Mm-hmm. Yeah, like I get things in bulk sometimes even the crime berries

 

01:56

and cranberries. And so how many different chutneys do you sell right now? At the moment, I'm thinking of like a backseat of that because I'm going to start on a different vegetable also in the food category. Oh, you're gonna do something different other than chutneys? Yes, that's right. What do you gonna produce? Actually, I'm going to be producing a recipe book.

 

02:25

Oh, wow. A recipe book. So how many recipes are you going to include in that? At the moment, it's 30. I am going to add more. Well, 30. That's a lot of recipes. I don't think I could come up with 30 recipes or ideas to cook with. So are you as what you're saying is people can't get your chutneys now? Is that the idea? I think it's seasonal at the moment. And it's been a while since I made the chutneys. Okay.

 

02:53

Is there any still available or should we just wait for the recipe book?

 

02:58

I'm you can do a bit of both as and you can contact rosh's chutneys Let me know if you're interested in some and then I can make according To whoever wants. Oh, I see what you mean. Okay, so and just to be clear that's rosh's chutneys calm rosh's chutneys calm and all the contact information is there so that sounds really really good

 

03:25

And so this cookbook, what kind of recipes are you sort of focusing on? Is this, you are Indian, so are the recipes in this new recipe book going to focus on Indian cuisine, or are you going to branch out