I am happy to announce to all devotees the forthcoming publication of a new cookbook series, The Kitchen Religion Series, Quantity Cooking for the Krishna Kitchen, a set of four volumes of quantity cooking cookbooks, by Kitchen Religion Books. This is a never done before effort to provide quantity cooking recipes for prasadam distribution to the worldwide devotee community in a format that will facilitate cooking from 10 – 1,000 people. Thus, the series is also subtitled, For Family Gatherings to Large Festivals.
Each of the four volumes focuses on one food category (vegetables, rice, soups and dahls), and the fourth will be the highlight of the set with 108 halava flavors that will make a devotee out of every bite. The cookbooks also include extensive quoting from Srila Prabhupada on the subject of prasadam, Cooking Tips and Notes, a Kitchen Standards document, and a Metric Equivalent Chart.
The series will be available in 2014 with the first book on quantity rice cooking coming out in January. However, they are available for pre-order at a 15% discount online at the Kitchen Religion Books website, www.kitchenreligionbooks.com.
Below is the Introduction from the rice cookbook with many anecdotes, instructions and stories about prasadam, the secret weapon of the Hare Krishna Movement.
Introduction
This cookbook series, “The Kitchen Religion Series, Quantity Cooking for the Krishna Kitchen,” is an idea whose time has come. As Srila Prabhupada once said, quoting the oft-repeated phrase, “Variety is the spice of life.” This series will offer that “spice” for the quantity Krishna Kitchen cooks who lack sufficient selections in their menu-making efforts. And it also provides quantity recipes in an organized written format with flow charts of ingredient proportions with metric equivalents which has never before been done within the Hare Krishna devotee community.
It's also a series that was years in the making, and still continues to be in the making as more recipes are developed. This is the first of several books to be published in the set, each volume focusing on a particular cooking category, drawing recipes from around the world - vegetable dishes, rice, soups/dahls, etc.. It took me about three years to compile and test all the recipes for these cookbooks, and my test subjects were a thousand students a day at the University of Florida's Krishna Lunch program. What started back in 1972 as a “Krishna picnic” on the campus Free Speech area eventually blossomed into a full-blown lunch program that now consistently serves thousands of students healthy and tasty Krishna prasadam all throughout the school year. And I was their cook from 2008-11.
Aside from quantity cooking, the ingredient charts will also offer the recipes with proportions to facilitate cooking for as little as ten people making this cookbook series also appealing for use by families and Deity cooks alike. Thus, it is aptly sub-titled, “For Family Gatherings to Large Festivals.”
What about the name, the “Kitchen Religion Series”? How did I come up with that? This phrase, “Kitchen Religion,” was used by His Divine Grace Srila Prabhupada to describe the Krishna consciousness movement. One reason is because prasadam was and still is our “secret weapon,” as he called it, against maya, illusion, in our attempts to wake up the forgetful conditioned souls. He even referred to gulabjamuns, those tasty, juicy, spongy, sweet, rose-flavored milk balls that are an all- time favorite of devotees, as “ISKCON Bullets.” And in our personal fight against maya, prasadam plays perhaps the most important role in keeping us devotees. I think all of us will attest to this fact.
Prasadam is so important in the lives of devotees. We understand and have faith that it is spiritual food and can change one's consciousness because it is non-different from Krishna. It's the remnants of His meal, laced with the sweetness from being touched by His transcendental lips, and therefore we are not exactly eating food, but respecting Krishna in the form of food. Thus it is said that we are honoring prasadam. And Srila Prabhupada, citing the scientific fact that every seven years all the cells of our body are replaced with new ones, used to say that one who eats Krishna prasadam every day will have a “prasadam body” in seven years.
Krishna consciousness is also called the kitchen religion because food is so important even in the spiritual world. Srimati Radharani is known for never making the same preparation twice (except perhaps for a number of Sri Krishna's favorites), and the extraordinary feasts during Lord Caitanya's time played an extremely important role in His lilas. All devotees have also relished hearing the wonderful pastimes of Krishna as the butter thief and having lunch with his cowherd boyfriends while tending the calves and cows in the forests and pastures of Vrindaban. Such food related pastimes are an essential part of the spiritual world.
Prasadam and its distribution also play an important role in the performance of Vedic yajnas, wherein the sacrifice is not considered complete without the distribution of sanctified foods. Vedic grhasthas must also distribute prasadam on a daily basis as a religious duty by calling out to the general public, “If anyone is hungry, please come and eat,” before having their own meals. And Lord Krishna Himself stresses the importance of eating food first offered for sacrifice in the Bhagavad-gita (3.13).
The kitchen is also known as the extension of the altar and as Radharani's favorite room, wherein several opulent meals are prepared for the deities every day without fail. At the Jagannatha Puri Temple in Orissa, Lord Jagannatha, Baladeva, and Subhadra get 56 food offerings a day. The standards of cleanliness and punctuality, the two most important elements of Deity worship, are also part and parcel of all kitchen services. Srila Prabhupada said that the sign of a brahmin cook is that he or she leaves the kitchen cleaner than they found it. And he also instructed that “cooking means cleaning.” One of the verses we sing daily when worshiping the spiritual master describes how he offers Krishna four varieties of delicious foods and that he is satisfied just to see his disciples honoring Krishna prasadam. The plain fact is that Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, enjoys eating and therefore, Krishna consciousness, on one level, is a food-based spiritual process; we cook for Krishna's pleasure with love and devotion, and He returns His remnants to us out of love for His devotees. Thus, it really is indeed the kitchen religion.
The Hare Krishna Sunday Feast, originally named the Sunday Love Feast by Srila Prabhupada, is a mainstay of all ISKCON centers worldwide and plays a most important role in the kitchen religion concept. When I joined the Hare Krishna Movement in 1971 at the New York temple on Henry Street in Brooklyn, a normal Sunday Feast would consist of two vegetable preps (one always with curd chunks, fried or plain), fancy rice, dahl, pakoras or samosas, bharas in tomato or yogurt sauce, chutney, gulabjamuns or lugloos, halava, sweet rice and a nectar drink. These were spectacular feasts all prepared with ghee, butter, curd, and yogurt just as Srila Prabhupada taught us. No oil or tofu back then. Only “liquid religiosity,” as he referred to dairy products. He specifically referred to milk as “the miracle food for children and old men” and as a most important food that nourishes the finer brain tissues that aid in understanding spiritual concepts. And, after all, Krishna's favorite animal is the cow and her dairy products are His favorite foodstuff. He likes butter so much that He even steals it because He can't get enough of it at home, and then He shares it with the monkeys. Therefore, as Srila Prabhupada taught, if we love Krishna it behooves us to offer Him what He likes best. He gave the example that if the master asks for a glass of water you don't bring him milk thinking it's better than water.
Bhaktivinoda das used to stay up all night cooking the 50 gallons of sweet rice for the New York Sunday Feasts, narrowly escaping falling into the boiling milk pot during bouts of nodding out. The samosa filling was true to the original cauliflower- pea recipe taught by Srila Prabhupada wherein the cauliflower and peas are cooked to a paste-like consistency, an extremely time consuming feat for large quantities, what to speak of the additional time it took to form the samosas and fry them. But material time was irrelevant. We wanted to offer the best to Sri Sri Radha Govinda, the Lords of the Henry Street temple. And everyone who honored Their Lordship's prasadam could taste the love and devotion that went into these sumptuous (a word Srila Prabhupada used, meaning “large and lavish”) feasts. This was the kitchen religion at its best.
Most temples had similar menus, and the feast was the highlight of the week for the temple devotees and the clincher for guests and aspiring devotees to give their lives to Srila Prabhupada and his mission. It's also a well known historical fact that devotees became famous not just for their street sankirtan, but also for their food. And perhaps vegetarianism itself may not have caught on so well if it weren't for prasadam.
I learned to cook at the Henry Street temple from the original Hare Krishna cookbook (available on the VedaBase) and a few mentors like Apurva das, Visnugada das and Mangalananda das. Eventually I became the cook on one of the Radha-Damodar traveling sankirtan buses and even received a cooking lesson or two from the celebrated Vishnujana Swami on how to make his famous strawberry malpuras, a flat, oval-shaped version of the usual ball-shaped confections that are soaked in fruit-flavored yogurt. He would make these for all the devotees to enliven them as a reward when they returned from book distribution.
The Radha-Damodar Traveling Sankirtan Party (RDTSKP) feasts were literally from another world. We would have gulabjamun eating contests that entailed catching gulabjamuns in your mouth that were thrown to you, and it wasn't uncommon for a devotee to ingest 50-60 gulabjamuns in one sitting in an effort to win the competition. I remember once making gulabjamuns from a recipe I got from an Indian cookbook. Instead of powdered milk they were made of boiled sweet potatoes mashed and rolled into balls, stuffed with milk fudge (burfi), fried in ghee, and soaked in sugar water. Devotees talked about these heavenly delights for years.
The concept of Hare Krishna restaurants, so very important to the kitchen religion ideology, also originated with Srila Prabhupada and was a unique and modern way to distribute prasadam. I helped develop and cooked for the now famous Kalachandji's Restaurant in Dallas which opened in 1982 and was rated by The Dallas Morning News as one of the top 10 restaurants to open that year. By 1987 it had become so popular that the Vegetarian Times magazine rated it one of the Top Ten vegetarian restaurants in the United States. An average weekend night would draw up to 150 people in the span of 4 hours, and there would be a waiting line that extended out the front door of the temple and onto the sidewalk. It was the talk of the town attracting both the well-to-do of Dallas along with the regular vegetarian crowd, and all the local print media carried glowing reviews of our vegetarian fare.
An offshoot of Kalachandji's was Magic Lotus Catering, which catered touring vegetarian (and sometimes non-vegetarian) musicians and bands that came to Dallas. This also grew dramatically, and many a traveling rock star received Kalachandji's mercy in the form of the kitchen religion's secret weapon, prasadam. The list of celebrities included George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Frank Zappa, B.B. King, Todd Rundgren, Ozzie Ozborn, Kenny G., Eric Johnson, Rush, Boston, The Kinks, REM, The Eurythmics, The Pretenders, Culture Club and a host of others, including the legendary Tiny Tim. Additionally, Magic Lotus Catering traveled with one of the first Lollapalooza music tours, setting up food vendor stalls at about 35 shows during the summer of 1992.
However, my most memorable and spiritually inspiring cooking experience was cooking once for Srila Prabhupada. It was in the summer of 1976 that Srila Prabhupada came to New York for the first New York Rathayatra. Simultaneously, he also took the opportunity to go for a visit to the Gita Nagari farm in Pennsylvania. The Radha-Damodar bus managed by Mahamuni das, on which I was the cook, was there at the time, and it was decided that he go to Gita Nagari in the bus, and I was to be his cook. However, Srila Prabhupada was exhibiting a pastime of being sick with a cold, and I was told to limit the meal to fruit only. The bus sped off at 4am the next day with Srila Prabhupada and his entourage, and after mangal arati and japa I was told to prepare the fruit for serving after Srimad-Bhagavatam class.
The fruit was served out, but at this point Srila Prabhupada made an unusual request; he wanted pakoras. And not just your common pakoras either. He wanted whole-green-chili pakoras! Not being prepared for this, I only managed to locate a single head of cauliflower, mixed up a batch of the original Hare Krishna Cookbook pakora batter (my favorite batter recipe) and began to fry the pakoras (in ghee, of course) while speeding along the highway at 65 miles an hour. Batch by batch the pakoras were brought out to Srila Prabhupada, who continued to request more. As most cooks know, one head of cauliflower can make a considerable number of small pakoras, probably enough to feed about five average hungry devotees. In the end, Srila Prabhupada had consumed the entire head's worth of cauliflower pakoras. It was like a lila out of Caitanya- caritamrta, and I was a part of it. Later I was introduced to Srila Prabhupada as the cook, and he nodded and approved with a big smile. I had pleased my spiritual master with this simple service.
Besides the recipes, my intention is to also make this series educational and informative. Thus, aside from the recipes and interesting and instructive anecdotes and stories in this Introduction, the reader/cook will also find a detailed document of Kitchen Standards, practical and usable cooking tips, relevant quantity charts, and inspiring quotes from Srila Prabhupada about prasadam. It is also provided in the form of a workbook, with room for notes and quantity/ingredient adjustments so that any cook in any part of the world, whether at home or at a temple, whether cooking for 10 or 1,000, can utilize the variety of recipes contained herein. As a side note, I recommend all serious cooks read the pages titled Cooking Tips and General Notes before doing anything.
Overall, this cookbook series is an offering to Srila Prabhupada and the devotees in general to give further inspiration for prasadam distribution worldwide and strengthen our forces against the onslaught of Kali-yuga. It represents 40+ years of cooking experience for Deities, for the masses and for everyone in-between. And as this volume is solely about rice, future volumes will provide hundreds of quantity recipes for vegetable dishes, soups and dahls, etc., with my supreme offering to the Krishna cooks of the world being The Great 108 Halava Flavors Cookbook. May all who read this series be pleased and bless me with ongoing inspiration to help Srila Prabhupada push on this great Kitchen Religion.
Sunanda das
maha-prasade govinde nama-brahmani vaisnave
sv-alpa-punya-vatam rajan visvaso naiva jayate
“Persons who are not very highly elevated in pious activities cannot believe in the remnants of food offered to the Supreme Personality of Godhead, nor in Govinda, nor in the holy name of the Lord, nor in the Vaisnavas.”
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