In this picture you see Mr.Suresh, a friend of Thanigaivel, cooking food at Thanigaivel’s residence. This continued till 30th November. We decided to open up Satyananda Yoga Centre for preparing food on 30th November and the kitchen opened on 1st December 2015.
Mr.Srinivasan, has been regularly providing his catering service to several needs at the centre for the last over five years. We have even sent his team twice to our Rikhia ashram. A team of dedicated cooks were organized through his contact and hygenic and delicious food was prepared by them.
The food prepared was offered to Sri Swami Satyananda and the prasad was distributed to people living in different areas in Chennai. During this entire period we had closed the kitchen in our home and the food prepared for distribution was the prasad that was partaken by all the volunteers between 1st December to 8th December.
We decided to give one rice item al lunch and one tiffin item for dinner. We felt that it is very important to prepare healthy, nutritious, tasty item and serve it as much as possible hot.
Brinji, with lots of vegetables and soya meal maker, Sambar rice with lots of vegetables and dhal, tomato rice with lots of tomato and onion. We used good quality refined oil to prepare our delicious menu.
Evening menu usually was Uppuma, Rava Kichidi or Rava Pongal
In spite of the incessant rain, we got continuous supply of vegetables. We got support from Mr.Thanigaimalai, a vegetable supplier in Koyambedu and the fresh and high quality vegetables that were supplied to us simply stumped us. Mr.Thanigaimalai even gave away loads of vegetables he deals with absolutely free of cost, which would have cost us about Rs20,000/- extra.
That night we slept peacefully and satisfied that we had started off what was appropriate, not knowing that the next day and the days to come were going to be dreadful!