Press Coverage - Dinamani 18 Jan 2009

Dinamani, a leading Tamil daily carried a short article on Jan 18 about the event.

Cooking Solo for 500 - Collage 2...

Another collage of the Cooking Solo for 500 event...

Cooking Solo for 500 - The Story

Hiya fellow bloggers, friends, Couchsurfers, Chennai Food guide members and critics, 

First of all, a big thanks. Thanks for your blogs and good wishes. Thanks for spurring me on. The cooking Solo for 500 really exceeded expectations. 

The event stemmed from an argument with a few professional chefs who claimed One page cookbooks were over simplified and are not practical. I know one page cookbooks work flawlessly on a small scale - I've been cooking with them for years and my friends swear by it. But I was not sure if they would work on a large scale. On impulse, I challenged them that I'll follow the One page cookbook recipes exactly, to cook up something never attempted before - cook solo a 10 course marriage feast for  500 people in under 3 hours. By then I was worked up and also added that there will be dishes from all four South Indian states - Tamilnadu, Andhra, Kerala and 

Karnataka. The bragging felt so good that I got carried away and bet that I'll start from scratch - which means cutting up vegetables, blending chilies, pureeing tomatoes etc. The only help I would take would be to remove the huge cooked pots from the fire. So the challenge was on – start from scratch and cook solo a 10 course marriage feast for 500 people in under three hours. I have cooked for people from over 25 countries and wanted to use this event to dispel the myth that South Indian cuisine was too spicy for foreigners.

My main concern was that I have never cooked for a party larger than 20 and have never handled the huge vessels and other equipment used for large scale cooking. But I was convinced that my simple recipes would work. So the challenge was on.

I then compiled 10 simple recipes , from all four southern states, which are relatively fool proof and can be cooked fast. The next big challenge was to raise the huge amount of money to book a respectable marriage hall, hire equipment, invite people and do the thousand odd things you need to do to assemble 500 people, media and invite friends from across the world.

I badly wanted to do a dry run, but it meant another large outlay of funds and so it never hapened.

So finally, on Jan 17, the show was on. With the media and a crowd of volunteers inspecting the kitchen and verifying that nothing was prepared, I started cooking at 3.15 PM. Handling the heavy 40 Kg vessels and the 6 foot long ladles was much tougher than I thought. It took me over two hours to get comfortable with the equipment. But things started easing up and I got my rhythm back. By then the kitchen was packed with people and media. Finally, after 2 hours, thirty seven minutes and forty seconds, I lifted the last cauldron of Semiya payasam ( vermicelli  milk pudding ) off the fire and wild cheering broke out.  Yes, One page cookbooks work !

A short bragging session,  photo shoot and a couple of interviews later, it was feeding time and I held my breath. Over the next two hours, the stack of 500 plates shrunk and vanished. This was the only way we were keeping track of the number of people. A small pile of around 100 plates was washed and stacked again. After 523 plates, there was still enough food for around 100 people, which was distributed locally.  I was thrilled that people from across the country had traveled huge distances to attend and that people from 10 different countries tasted South Indian marriage cuisine. Feeding so many people gave me such a big rush !. 

Here’s the event in pictures.

BTW, I now am cocky enough to bet that I can repeat this for twice the people in  half the time . I'm convinced that One Page Cookbooks are so simple to follow and are so fail proof , that I'm betting I can teach a novice cook to repeat this, with just a one day training session - any takers ?  

Here's the proposed menu

1. Ash gourd Olan 

2. Majjiga pulusu

3. Jeeragae Tambli

4. Shallot Sambar

5. Pepper Rasam

6. Garlic Kulambu 

7. Cabbage Kootu

8. Potato Podimas

9. Tomato pappu

10. Sago payasam

I did it !

One page cookbooks work ! To prove the point, I cooked a 10 course meal for 500 people yesterday evening in under three hours. Right from chopping vegetables to getting food on the table, it took me 2 hours, thirty seven minutes and forty seconds. 

A nice gathering of friends ( I'm surprised that over a hundred of my friends turned up !)  and great fun. A healthy coverage by the media. Will post more pics soon. 

1001 Easy Jambalaya ( Cajun / Creole One pot meal)

 Jambalaya :

Jambalaya is a one pot meal with rice, meat and vegetables. It is the Cajun / Creole adaptation of the Spanish Paella. Replace the seafood in Spanish paella with meats and it starts resembling Jambalaya.

Cajuns & Creoles :  
Acadia, (a region in Eastern Canada) was a part of the French colonial empire in the 1700’s. Under a treaty, the French ceded it to the English. The Acadians refused to swear loyalty to the English and were evicted under the Great Expulsion. Many eventually settled inLouisiana, a former French colony. Louisiana already had a large native French speaking population, a large number of them being the second born sons of aristocrats seeking adventure and fortune in the New World, later came to be called  Creoles. Louisiana in turn was ceded by French to Spain. The Acadians morphed under the Spanish and Creole influence and became a distinct ethnic group - the Cajuns. Bell pepper, onion, and celery are added to almost everything and are called the holy trinity of Cajun cuisine. Parsley, bay leaf, spring onions and dried cayenne pepper are common Cajun flavourings. The Cajun refugees, forced to live off the land, rebuilt their cuisine around locally available rice, vegetables, crawfish and game meat – setting  “a table in the wilderness” Cajun meals are simple - rice, skillet cooked cornbread vegetables, game meat / seafood. Creole cuisine is more elaborate with its European influenced recipes and French sauces The Creole version of Jambalaya uses tomatoes and Cajun versions do not. 

With the intermingling of so many  cultures, Lousiana cuisine has given rise to a delightful array of unique dishes like Jambalaya, Gumbo ( thick stew , usually with Okra) and eTouffee ( Seafood stew, served with rice).

As with 1001 one page cookbooks, 10 different bases are combined with 10 flavouring agents and ten additives to create a thousand easy Jambalaya recipes, numbered from 000 to 999. 

The bases
 A variety of meats as listed in column 1 are used as a base.

The flavouring
Celery, onion and bell peppers form the basic flavouring. A variety of other flavouring listed in column 2 can also be used.

The additives
Almost any vegetable as listed in column 3  can be used .

1001 Easy Vegan Chili ( Spicy Bean Stew)

Replace the animal protein with plant protein in a meat based chili and you get a vegan chili.

This cookbook lists 10 different beans / lentils, which are combined with 10 flavouring agents and ten additives to create a thousand vegan chili recipes, numbered from 000 to 999.

 The base
Only a handful of beans / lentils are commonly used in chili. But we now have acces to  a huge variety of  other beans / lentils any of which can be used as a base. When in season, you can experiment with using  fresh beans / lentils. All beans can be sprouted and you can try using them in place of dry beans.  The quick cooking lentils, so popular in Indian cuisine, need no pre soaking and can be used to whip up a bowl of chili fast.  Larger beans however,  need to be soaked overnight.

 The flavouring
Cumin, onion and garlic form the basic flavouring. A couple of pinches of the mild Kashmiri chili powder can be used to lend a deep reed color to the chili. A variety of other flavouring listed in column 2 can also be used.

 The additives
A variety of vegetables as listed in column 3 can be cooked along with the beans to cook up a huge array of chili.

1001 Simple Chili ( Spicy Meat / Bean Stew)

Chili pepper was domesticated 10,000 years ago in the Americas. 500 years back, they travelled with Columbus to Spain and soon spread across the world. When eaten, capsaicinoids (a group of plant chemicals occurring in chilies) fool the brain into believing that the mouth is on fire.  The brain responds by raising heart rate, increasing sweat, and releases endorphins (the feel-good hormone), to soothe the body. This 'rush' is what makes chilies so addictive. 

Added to meat and cooked into a stew with some flavouring, it soon became a wildly popular stew - Chili con carne (literally peppers with meat). Beans were probably added later to stretch the stew and in many versions they replace meat.  With its name shortened to Chili, it is now the official dish of Texas.   

A huge variety of meats / beans can be used along with a variety of flavouring and additives as listed above. A dash of beer / wine / sour cream / vinegar / pickle juice can be mixed in before serving.

Chili can be served straight or with crackers, cooked rice, pasta, tamale, corn bread, cinnamon rolls, sandwiches or tortillas. They can also be used as a topping for hot dog, cheese & fries, corn chips or mashed potatoes. A glass of ice cold beer, cola or milk goes well with a bowl of chili. Chili can be thick, soupy or watery. They can be thickened  with masa, cornflour or crushed crackers. They age well, getting tastier with storage. The traditional recipes call for long gentle cooking over a few hours. A pressure cooker reduces the cooking time dramatically. The Indian whistling pressure cooker is probably the easiest and fastest way to cook chili. A variety of chilies can be used to cook the chili. The chilies so used can be fresh, dried, boiled or even grilled. Each variation subtly alters the taste and flavour of the stew.  

Thousands of ‘the most authentic and tastiest’ versions exist with bitter feuding over the inclusion or omission of meat / beans/ flavouring agents . This cookbook focuses on fool proof, simple chili recipes that a first time cook can cook up on the very first try.  The emphasis as always, is more on ease of preparation than on gourmet cooking.

As with most One page cookbooks, 10 different bases are combined with 10 flavouring agents and ten additives to create a thousand chili recipes, numbered from 000 to 999.

The bases

 A variety of meats / beans or both are used as a base. Meat can be ground ( available as chili grind) or chopped into bite sized cubes. Larger beans need to be soaked overnight and smaller ones can be cooked without soaking.

The flavouring

Cumin, onion and garlic form the basic flavouring. A variety of other flavouring listed in column 2 can also be used.

The additives

Most chilies do not use any vegetables (with the exception of tomato). But a variety of vegetables as listed in column 3 can be used.

Experiment and cook up your own versions !

And that's my entry for San Antonio's Chili cookoff Challenge.

Made my day !

M was good enough to write about the Cooking Solo for 500 event. With luck, it should hit the papers  before the event.  It sure made my day ! I do hope her book gets published this year. My, how well she writes !