Burning Man Adventure 2012, Part 1

Hi folks! :-)

I hope you're all having a great Fall season.

I went for my second Burn at the Burning Man Arts Festival in Nevada, and it was the best - despite all the dust storms and physical inconveniences! I loved it and had a great time volunteering with our Krishna kitchen crew, who cooked for and camped with the Opulent Temple Camp this year. I'm so grateful I got to serve with the wonderful team we had! 

We cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner for approx 200 people for more than a week (because KK also did some pre-burn service). I will introduce our KK crew 2012 with photo's below, since a picture speaks a million words better than I can! :-) Thank you to Gina, Bhava, Mandali, Jagadish and anyone else who provided photos. :-)

Our head chef, Nate, an empowered hard core cook, kind, wise father and friend to all - from Washington D.C. Because of him I was able to come and serve at this years Burn. And he generously offered Mandali and I the facility of his A.C. truck and took up austere quarters elsewhere,  just so we would be comfortable. I'm grateful to him for being such a selfless gentleman. 

In a sincere, humble mood of rendering devotional service, every day before entering the kitchen door he would reverentially touch his head to the earth, seeking the blessings of Sri Radha - Who, according to Bhakti yoga - is the embodiment of the divine feminine energy, and is in charge of the kitchen. So dear Burner friends, now you know why your food tasted so great!! :-) He got a huge round of applause every single lunch time for the nutritious tasty meals he cooked.

Mandali - beloved wife of the late Nitai (Krishna kitchen founder), bhakti yoga mystic, fashion designer, and our strong, inspired, divine priestess and friend - from New York. We all came to Burning Man this year because of her determination to do it for Nitai! And we felt his presence in everything which so magically flowed in happy service beyond our best hopes.

Dynamic Rasikananda - our enthusiastic, bold, 'jack of all trades' and graphic design genius from Tennessee, whose deadpan humor will keep you laughing all the way home! He was an empowered, inspired soul in making it possible for our Krishna Kitchen to even be able to do the Burn this year. 

Here he is holding the Divine Yajna Narayan - the "Original Burning Man" from Orissa, India! :-)

3 of our lively kitchen Ninja's:

Delightfully quick witted Radhanath, our photographer, upbeat trooper and kitchen helper - from Florida

Our amazing kitchen genie Mike, maker of salads, musician, open-hearted friend and food outreach monk - from San Antonio, Texas

Full of zest for life, Nitai, our focused kitchen assistant and cook, deadly fryer of frog fritters, who inspired us all with his enthusiasm to come to this Burn - all the way from Australia!

Mike with Yudhi - our kind, caring, sincere and hardworking cook, facilitator and on site KK manager with a big heart - from Laguna Beach

Advaita - our wonderful, inspiring "60 second meditation" monk, musician, artist, soul-gazing pied piper and kirtan night owl, an all round caring, supportive friend and stoic kitchen helper - from Croatia

Jagadish - our gentle, humble distributor of Nitai's burfi gifts, a nurse, and bhakti yoga practitioner. He was also Advaita's evening meditation side kick and unassuming serve-out / kitchen support man - from Pittsburgh

Nityodita - Nitai's Uncle, a dedicated kirtan man, senior bhakti yogi mystic, supportive presence, and all round kitchen helper - from Pennsylvania

Rare occurance! Our Krishna Kitchen crew actually having a meeting all together over dinner!

Yours truly - side kick to Nate and support to dear Mandali, artistic dessert and salad dressing creator and designer - from Ireland

And behind the scenes:

Tuka - our manager of Krishna Kitchen - the mover and shaker who stays in the background, strong, supportive and expert, the powerful voice of big brother checking in on you over the phone - from California

Dear, beautiful, sensitive Tashi - our guardian angel and goddess from Opulent Temple :-) Because of her vision and determination we had the opportunity to cook for OT Camp.

Sweet, friendly, caring Gina - with our boys, now part of the Krishna Kitchen family - she was another special angel with Opulent Temple

April - our wonderful, enthusiastic, cheerful patient driver and all round helper, a beautiful friend and sister with smiling eyes

Big hearted Anna - our kind host and Auntie to all of us, and patient driver who goes the extra mile to serve. Together with her husband Wayne she is caretaker of Krishna camp art and supplies

Nanda - our long distance, off site menu planner and recipe supplier this year, she is an inspired cook and bhakti yoga teacher in Boston

Bhava and Govinda - incredible cooks who came and cooked an evening meal giving the regular KK crew a break. :-) Thank you, I still remember that fantastic creamy coconut kofta sauce you made - I want the recipe!

Hari and Samantha - supportive friends skilled in the art of Thai massage, they relieved the worn shoulders of some of our crew with their healing hands! :-)

Walnut Burfi in memory of Nitai

Here is the recipe for a tasty short-cut Burfi, or Indian fudge, which I had the service of making this year at Burning Man in honor of the late Nitai Das (Elisha Drury - pictured above), founder of our Krishna Kitchen. 

The ingredients for this Burfi were sponsored by Carmen Ordonez, Nitai's loving Mom. Thank you! :-) I tweaked a Burfi recipe I'd been given til I liked it e.g. adding more liquid and more flavor.

 The original recipe also called for raisins - which we didnt have - so I made it with sweetened cranberries instead a couple of times.  I would prefer to make this with brown sugar, or an alternative, more healthy sweetener, but for this particular event I had to work with the ingredients I had at hand. It tastes alot like white chocolate! :-)

This recipe makes a very big tray full of Burfi, you would get at least 50-70 pieces out of this depending on what size you cut the squares into. Takes approx 20 minutes to make from beginning to end. So here goes!

Ingredients:

5 cups melted butter

10 cups white sugar (you could reduce the sugar by a cup or so if you prefer it less sweet)

2 3/4 - 3 cups whole milk

Approx 3 TBSP vanilla essence

10 cups whole milk powder

Approx 21/2 cups roughly crushed walnuts

Alternative flavors I made included; 

orange essence, walnut and cranberry

orange essence, lemon zest, walnut and chocolate chip

Method:

Place butter into a heavy bottomed wide pot and turn to medium heat. Beat sugar into butter and bring to a full boil. Boil for approx 4 mins til very lightly golden = so it becomes somewhat caramelized. 

Add in milk and vanilla essence and boil til sugar is dissolved.

Lower heat, and whisk in the milk powder, beating out any lumps. Add in walnuts, and cook for a few more minutes, stirring constantly so it doesn't burn.

Pour onto a buttered baking sheet/tray and smooth out with a spatula. Allow to cool. It is easiest to cut into squares or rectangles before it is fully hardened. You can chill it to speed up the process. Offer to Krishna and serve when fully cooled and set. Delicious! :-)

We wrapped the squares in aluminium foil for distribution, as gifts from our Krishna Kitchen to our fellow Burners, along with a small mantra meditation and ingredient card, designed by our friend Nandi Coupal, wife of our awesome head chef this year - Nate.  

We got plenty of rave reviews and people asking for seconds and thirds of this sweet treat! :-)

Burning Man Adventure

Hi Folks,


I'm glad to be finally back after an extended absence! My old faithful laptop crashed more than once, dying in slow increments, and it’s hard to keep up blogging from random computers without my stash of recipes and pic’s to keep things going! Be as it may, I have promised many of you an update so here we go! :-)


I have had plenty of adventures over the last few months. The most unique, and first of its kind for me, being a trip out to Nevada for the Burning Man event. Burning Man -- to the uninitiated -- basically translates as a 24/7 week long arts carnival, with a city of 50,000 peeps camping in a dried out lake bed, in the middle of nowhere, and decompressing in every imaginable way!! Burning Man is described by its organisers an annual art event and temporary community based on radical self expression and self-reliance in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Yep, you heard me right! I did indeed go, and stayed there for one week, helping a few friends out in Krishna Kitchen, where we cooked up a storm, amidst dust storms and all!


Krishna Kitchen was stationed in the Red Lightening camp, who are a great crew to be with. It was quite the operation to work with no running water, and with a small, often sleep-deprived crew of cooks and helpers, to create meals for 800+ hungry Burners every day!! All credit to Nitai and his team for doing this stint year in and year out. It was wild, crazy, fun and a great big adventure from beginning to end, and yep, I’d do it again!! This little report may also serve anyone who might want to do what I did i.e. volunteer in a Kitchen, so you may be more mentally prepared for the event.


In the mornings I'd help out my friend Nanda, who was one of our core cooks. She would typically prepare 2 or 3 items for the 11am brunch e.g. one day she made chocolate pancakes with a fantastic sweet fenugreek syrup, and a big fruit salad, and another day it was fluffy muffins and a hot veggie soup. The evening meals were created by our other cooks -- Puspavan and Sunanda -- and they always had a gourmet dinner menu of 5 or 6 items up their sleeves. Typically there would be a grain e.g. rice, a subji (Indian veg stew), a savory e.g. pakora’s (veggie fritters), chutney, salad, and a sweet dish. One day, on top of our regular cooking, Krishna Kitchen also catered finger food for the TED conference, and on another day - the meal for the organizers of the Burning Man event. So we were a very busy team indeed!


Apart from brunch help, I created the salads for dinner every day, and whoa, for someone like me who has never cooked for more than 200 before, that’s a hell of a lots of chop-up to do! To give you an idea, this is an approximation of what you might use for one salad; 8 heads of cabbage, 20 - 30 heads of lettuce, 50 sticks of celery, 30 carrots, 30 apples, 20 avocado's, 10 sweet potatoes, 20 bell peppers, 10 cucumbers, 20 mini boxes of cherry tomatoes, 20 handfuls raisins or cranberries, 20 handfuls sunflower seeds, a few bunches of grapes, 16 bags of mixed salad greens, etc., etc., etc. And prepping the salad dressing, of course!


Now that may not to be too big a deal, but add to it the following; you probably need to locate water, and the transfer containers from the previous meal, wash those in a sink already stacked with dishes where the faucets didn’t work because the pump motor had burned out, and it cost a fortune to repair - never mind find a fix-it man in the middle of nowhere (and cell phones don't work). Then find, clean and set up multiple containers to wash and rinse off the salad veggies (no running water remember), cooperate with the other cooks over how many of the limited chopping boards, knives and other utensils you need to use, dust off surfaces and disinfect, and set everything up so you can actually begin prepping.


And essential to the success of all this, you need to find, beg and cajole a minimum of three Burners wandering around in the vicinity to help you prep all of the items, turning a blind eye to external appearances, whether someone is dressed as a fairy, a horned devil, or in nothing at all and wants to hug you!! :-O (As an umarried and thus celibate Krishna girl that was sometimes embarrassingly awkward ).The camps signed up with Krishna Kichen had an agreement to provide two volunteers to help out per meal, but volunteers arent always easy to find, hence the search. Once I had a crew it was my task to make sure everyone followed the conscientious Krishna Kitchen protocol of cleanliness, including not eating any of the items as we prepped, etc. Thankfully most of the time I had a willing crew of volunteers, and the people I engaged with were genuinely friendly, helpful, open minded and good fun! Some were so sweet they came back the next day to help out again of their own accord, and you know who you are! :-)


Given all of the above, if you began prepping the salad by 3pm with a good, steady crew of helpers, you would be ready in time for the 6pm dinner serve out. Of course, most of the time there would be some kind of unexpected hitch or delay e.g. running out of water. And, as Murphy's Law says, on that day, all camps will promptly send their people to pick up their meals at once and suddenly you feel like you are expected to be supermen and superwomen in all regards. Learning not to take it personal if someone loses their cool with you, when you are just a volunteer yourself, was one lesson I had to encounter. I found that to remain functional it was important to take some quiet time out for myself each day. Key to functioning smoothly was to keep hydrated, be proactive and ask for help, keep a cool head, a loving heart and the patience of a saint.


Oh, and if you do decide to go, be sure to bring ear plugs so you can sleep through the pumping music at night and remain sane. And good comfy goggles to wear, so your eyes don’t burn like hellfire from the corrosive dust everywhere - or you'll have to go to a medical camp and get your poor 'ol peepers washed out with a saline wash and liquid painkiller like I did! I sure was glad there was a medical camp nearby. One unique feature of Burning Man is that there is no monetary exchange on site, so everything is more focused upon offering and receiving in a spirit of service and friendly reciprocation. I was also impressed with the degree of environmental awareness as far as the ecosystem there was concerned e.g. no garbage lying around. Burning Man is great exposure for all exhibiting artists, and there is alot of cool stuff to see and do.


If you are busy all day serving in a camp somewhere like I was, make sure to get a couple of hours out in the evening to relax and see some of the fun exhibits e.g. art cars in the form of dragons shooting fire from their noses, to pirate ships, octopuses, and whatnot. One of my favorite experiences was heading over to the huge wooden temple in the morning and participating in a meditative Kirtan, with some hardcore Krishna Kitchen crew and other random Burners. The temple looked like a labor of love, beautifully constructed with 5 domes, decorative cut out panels, and arching walkways bridging up either side.


On the last night of the camp the temple was burned down, which was a spectacular fire to say the least. The temple had served many functions from a place of cathartic release where people wrote their pain on the walls, to a place of meditation. I even saw several marriages and other rites of passage take place there. Although to me it initially seemed counter-intuitive to burn down a temple structure, on reflection, given that nothing can be left behind when the Burning Man event is over, and given the nature of the event itself, it seemed a fitting end to the whole week. And interestingly, everyone was reverentially silent as the structure burned. It was like a digestive pause before transitioning back into the world of norms.