It’s early Monday morning and Sheela Sankaran is busy making crisp dosas for breakfast at home. Till a few years back Sheela had time to finish making the breakfast, see her children off to school, and browse through the newspapers, before gearing up to cook the next meal for her family. Today, she is busy taking orders and cooking breakfast, lunch, tea-time snacks and dinner for an increasing number of clients. Sheela and four of her friends have formed a collective and stepped out of their kitchen into a more professional chef’s workstation. They now cater to a growing group who seem to crave for home-style food.
They are a sort of double nesters. Five women who split work and time between their homes and a business they run together. And, significantly, they have not left one nest empty, finding delight and contentment in both. The Antharjana-Kshatriya Vanitha Kootayma, constituted five years back, has made bold strides in five years.
It was in May 2010 that a group of homemakers in Tripunithura, all known to each other, decided to create a space where they could share their recipes, handed down to them by generations. “When we started there were eleven of us. From a room in one of our apartments we began making chammanthi podi, sambar podi and dosa podi. It was not on a large scale, just enough for us and to meet the demands of our friends,” says Gowri Vasudevan, the senior-most member of the group.
Cooking for the family, where their dishes were usually clear hits, prompted them to try sharing the same with the community outside. There were minor adjustments they had to make but generally it was serving just the same, home-cooked, traditional food, with no re-balancing of flavours. Soon, they realised that they could turn their interest, their culinary skills into a successful business proposition.
By then, five in their group had left for various reasons but this did not deter the rest from chasing their culinary dreams. “We can manage the daily orders if three of us are around. There’s more work only if there are extra orders or we are asked to cater for a special function, like a birthday,” says Bindu Gopakumar.
In these five years the collective has moved on from making just the different kinds of powders. They rustle up lunch, evening snacks and chappathis with a vegetable curry for dinner. “The chappathis we make are sold through a few shops in Tripunithura. This is apart from the patrons who place orders with us. We serve only vegetarian food. Our lunch is simple, with sambar, another curry and a thoran or mezhkupuratti . The evening snacks are traditional like the kozhukatta , parippurvada or the ela ada ,” informs Sheela.
Some of the items that they make like kurukku kalan , puli inji , banana chips are in huge demand and even have regular customers abroad.
What gives their food an edge is perhaps the ingredients for their recipes, very traditional, best known only to home chefs. It gives people a taste of flavours that remind them of home food.
“I get lunch from them every weekend, for five of us. What I have noticed is that they don’t add food colour or additives. It is like home food, cooked with the simplest ingredients, like what your mother or sister would make. I ordered a sadya for around 150 people for a function at home and they really did a great job. I think it could not have got more authentic than that,” says R.V. Vasudevan.
Now more and more people, most of them within their social network, place orders, buy batches of their products. With just five members there are days when they do find the going a bit tough. “There are requests from women if they could join us. The kitchen that we work from has just space for us five. What we do now on days when there are more orders, say for breakfast, is to begin very early. We finish it, get back home for our daily chores and rush back to complete the rest of the work,” states Usha P. Namboodiri.
The best part of catering is that it needs no formal qualification. It is all about cooking good food and delivering it on time. The collective has been able to do this for the past five years. These homemakers and chefs have also managed to blend work time and personal time. The five women do everything from scratch, choosing the best ingredients, cutting the vegetables, cooking, packing the chappathis to be sent to the stores, trying to keep the prices affordable.
“It’s been good. We do manage to earn extra money out of this. Not huge profits but are able to break even. Now, we are on the look out for a bigger space within the Fort area of Tripunithura. This would enable us to hire people. When we set up stalls for Onam or the temple festival we do occasionally hire someone, preferable a male, to do some of the work. Maybe in future we will able to expand our activities, our business,” hopes Gowri.
Contact Antharjana-Kshatriya Vanitha Kootayma at 9496311275, 8714438765.
