Thiruvananthapuram: Eleven Kudumbashree catering units with 111 pairs of hands in between them will prepare food for the audience at the Sports Hub stadium. The eight of those counters will be named 'Howzaatt'. The members are confident they will meet the demands of 15,000 people on the day of the match. “We have been doing this from National Games onwards. All of us had prepared food during the India vs New Zealand T20 match. It is regular work for us,” says Be-ena M.S., secretary of a Kudumbashree unit called ‘Keerthi’ from Vellayani.
The unit is camping at Kalabash Auditorium at Sreekaryam where tapioca will be peeled off and the vegetables cut the night before. On Thursday, at 4 am, the first batch of cooks will enter the central kitchen at the auditorium. They will slog for four hours, and then take the food to the stadium by 7 am. As they serve the food there, the second batch will start cooking.
The menu includes biryani, sandwich, chappathi roll, tapioca and fish curry, appam and orotti. “There will also be Malabar snacks like ‘chatti pathiri’, ‘unnakkaya’ and ‘kilikkoodu’,” says Sheejo Philip, president, Kudumbashree’s Training Institute of Cafe Management and Services .
Food can be taken into the stadium till 10 am. After this, by 2.30 pm, the stadium will open its gates again for snacks. In the evening the food stock will be again re-plenished in a third round. “There was a final briefing on Wednesday, in which we went through green protocol and other things to take care of,” says Assistant District Mission Coordinator Anjana M S.
(Around 50,000 people will be there to watch the match. The rest of the audience will be served by the Poojappura prison catering unit.)
