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