We have a little WhatsApp group running amongst our church Home Group. Although we are a big church, say 300-400, we are divided into smaller groups of about 15, so we can get to know each other better and grow together. My latest culinary offering was made earlier this week – veggie curry. Seven peeps said “yes please” and then my worries started: me poisoning the church.
Now I should say we have provided the odd meal here and there to these folk. But NOT seven in one go. So having offered, I needed to deliver. I began with checking how folk liked their curry and I gave them the following choice via WhatsApp:
- Medium
- Hot
- Blow your brains out
Needless to say, nobody wanted their brains blown out by one of my curries, or anything else for that matter, so medium it was to be. I wasn’t surprised as we are a conservative bunch (mostly) and some are of an elderly disposition.
This is where the fear crept in. Okay everyone wants a medium curry but what do they mean by “medium”? My idea of a medium curry is where you have a runny nose, drink three pints of water and can still taste it as I brush my teeth at bedtime. Is that the kind of “medium” they want?
I decided to play it safe. We bought a couple of jars of curry sauce, medium of course. That would be the spicy basis for the curry. Simple. All I had to do was find enough vegetables, mix it all up, simmer for 20 minutes and cook some rice. What could possibly go wrong?
Now I do like to be a little unpredictable and the thought of including a special ingredient was compelling. So when Rachel found some frozen pumpkin I knew I had struck gold. The pumpkin chunks were mixed in with onion, spring onion, mushrooms, green beans, tinned tomatoes, real tomatoes, a squirt of ketchup, some sultanas, a little dollop of tomato puree, the curry sauce and probably a few other bits I found lurking in the fridge, that was complete.
Meanwhile the rice was cooking and am I the only person who never seems to get the quantities right? The instructions always say 70g per person but this seemed to go an awfully long way.
We got the production line bubbling away nicely with a series of takeaway boxes lined up ready for the meal. All seven were filled to the brim and there as loads left over.
“Strewth, I said, this is just like Jesus feeding the 5,000, there’s even more left over!”
As Rachel went off in the Honda delivering the meals, just like Meals on Wheels of old, I settled down with my curry. It was okay, not quite up to my definition of “medium” but had thankful thoughts.
Or wait a minute. Some of the Home Group members might have a delicate disposition, are they going to end up in hospital with food poisoning? What if they all end up in hospital? Surely, no surely it’s not that hot? And then all kind of irrational thoughts spun through my mind as I tried to counter balance them with “oh it’s only vegetables, they won’t get serious food poisoning”.
Seems everything was okay. Since then there have been messages saying how much they appreciated the meal and “did you use a paste, or just the spices?”.
Well, I haven’t answered that yet, I’m still wallowing in the fact there haven’t been any prayer requests for people with food poisoning.