Curry and Rice x 1025!!

I never thought I would ever say this about Rob.....but on Thursday night he and a couple of guys pulled an 'all nighter'.

I am sure that I have mentioned our wonderful neighbour who cooks for a hobby and regularly feeds hundreds of street people in Worcester, where he lives and fixes people's teeth! To us he is known as 'Meals On Heels', or MOH for short, as, every second weekend when he is here in the village, he fires up his braai at 4 in the morning, and cooks, and cooks, and cooks! And when he has done all the cooking, he delivers plates of it to friends and neighbours! And if it happens to be raining, well, he simply drives his deliveries to everyone and then he is known as 'Meals On Wheels'!

Anyway, every year he cooks fund-raising curry and rice for 'Huis Wittekruin', the Retirement Village in Vredenburg.  (He does it for several Retirement Homes as well as Vredenburg.)This entails an all-night-cook-up and this year Rob and Daan offered their services. On Thursday afternoon Gene (MOH) arrived with a trailer filled to capacity with six black pots and twelve bags of wood. Now, when I say pots, I mean POTS. We have a black pot that we use for potjies and it is a number 1. His pots are number 25, big enough to cook a missionary! (Brand new, they cost R2905....each! Their capacity is 85 litres and they weigh 65 kg. Now work out how much curry they can produce!) These he then off-loaded at the cook-spot at 'Huis Wittekruin'  and gathered  the rest of the ingredients from meat to salt to spices to sugar to vegetables. Then it was home for a sleep. (Rob was not lucky enough to sleep, as we had the men here fitting insulation in our roof, but that is next week's blog!!)


So, at 11.15 p.m. off they set! Armed with flasks of coffee, folding chairs for in-between, jackets and hats, they were ready for the cook-up of the year, while I showered and headed to bed with Alfie!

Let the cooking begin! The pots lined up and fired up and ready!

It worked like clockwork. The fires were lit, each pot had the same amount of ingredients, added at the same time and stirred with MOH's huge wooden spoon. 4 litres of water first followed at roughly twenty minute intervals, by 35 kg cubed beef, a pocket of (sliced) onions, a pocket of potatoes (peeled and cut up), 11 bags of frozen mixed vegetables, 1 kg sugar, 500 gm salt, a bottle of Worcestershire Sauce, and 500 gm curry powder!  As the fires died down, more wood was tucked under the pots and it all bimbled and burbled until everything was tender and tasty. The fire-in-waiting became the sit-around camp fire and kept them warm!

Daan and MOH after a long night!

And while it was all cooking, they sat and drank coffee and put the world to rights.

The ladies dishing-up.

At 5-ish on Friday morning the first volunteers arrived to begin the task of dishing portions into polystyrene tubs. The rice was cooked and ready and the tables were eventually covered with ready-to-sell curry and rice!

Curry and rice harvest time! (Pics thanks to Rob)

All in all they had 1025 portions and had sold 900 by the time Rob got home at 9, tired and smelling like a campfire! My first thought was 'Who on earth will wash those pots?' I imagined a little old lady in a raincoat and rubber gloves climbing over the side!

And guess what we had for lunch???

And it was delicious!