Dear Brothers and sisters,
As you all know, Krishna Puja will be celebrated from 19 to 21 August 2011 in Cabella. The organizing countries are the three Americas.
Some of us will be joining the Cabella Kitchen Team and will be cooking during the puja weekend, and had the desire to cook Indian food during the weekend and Biryani for Saturday dinner, as was the tradition when Mother used to give the menus in the former times.
As many of you know, when the pujas first started happening in Cabella, Shri Mataji Herself cooked Her Divine food for all of the Sahaja Yogis. Later on, under the loving guidance of Shri Mataji, a cooking team was developed and coordinated. Shri Mataji would give the menus and recipes to Mala (these recipes are all in the book “Cooking with Love – Divine Recipes”) and She would also eat the food cooked for the yogis and give them feedback about it. Mother knew EVERY little detail of how things were going on in the collective kitchen, and She would let us know - whether the rice was washed properly or not, or whether the chick peas were cooked correctly, or whether the oil was heated up to the right temperature - nothing escaped Her attention.
Shri Mataji always took great care about the quality of the ingredients. She would arrange for a big container with spices and basmati rice (hard to find in Europe at that time) to be brought from India. The lamb and other spices would come from England, vegetables and fruits and most of the other things of course from Italy, and a few other things from different countries. The menus were very rich, befitting great festivities in India.
The yogis living in the Castle in Cabella told us that when the subject arose of an upcoming puja, the first question Shri Mataji would ask was, “What are the yogis going to eat?” And that She gave very much importance to this. All of us who had the blessing to be part of that cooking team know and heard directly from Shri Mataji how important is the cooking for the yogis.
In Greece, after the 2001 Diwali Puja, Mother told us in such a sweet way, “(the cooking for the pujas) It is a lot of work, but you see, the yogis they like to eat this food. When I told them that we can have food arranged from a restaurant, they said, ‘Shri Mataji, we like this Indian food,’ - and that’s why we have to do it.”(the cooking) We could feel how much of Her love was put in this. The Goddess Herself wanting to please us, to give us satisfaction through the Nabhi. Later on Shri Mataji said “You have to teach them, they have lost the sense of taste”. At the time we could not fully grasp the meaning of that sentence. Sometime after, the cookbook “Cooking with Love” was put together and published.
We all know how wonderful the vibrations are in the kitchen, how easily we are in thoughtless awareness, and how much we can feel Mother’s attention there. It is such a collective place!
EVERYone is important in the kitchen - those who do the shopping, those who carry truckloads of food, those who set up the appliances and prepare the kitchen, those who help to peel and chop, those who clean and wash up, those who prepare the tables, those who serve, our wonderful green team, those who take care of the rubbish, those who take care of people preparing drinks and tea, those who contribute with their love, ideas and enthusiasm, and those who cook. It is a great team, where we are all important and we cannot manage without each other’s contribution.
In this context, the yogis from the Americas would like to invite all those who, independently from your country of origin would like to come and join the kitchen team. Let us all enjoy together. Let us peel and chop, putting our love into it, let us wash up and clean putting our love into it, let us serve the people in the same way we would serve people in our houses, with full love and respect, and let us try to satisfy and please all our brothers and sisters, all our children. Let us be instruments of our Mother’s love, may it flow through our cooking and serving the collective.
We would be happy to receive names and e-mail addresses from yogis from any country who like to share the kitchen adventure for this Krishna Puja (Chai will be available ;-))) and the upcoming pujas.
For more details, please contact the present Chef de Cuisine, Susanne Perauer from Austria: s.perauer@aon.at, who has been cooking in Cabella for the last years or Purnima Holecek (purnimaholecek@hotmail.com).
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