Eleven ladies from refugee camps for Sri Lankan Tamils in Thoothukudi have began their very own restaurant serving sambal and fish curry
Eleven ladies from refugee camps for Sri Lankan Tamils in Thoothukudi have began their very own restaurant serving sambal and fish curry
Back at residence in Neer Kolumbu, a seaside village in Colombo, Sri Lanka, cooking got here naturally to Rohini Perara. She cooked alongside along with her 5 sisters, chatting and laughing as she floor the sambal with the stone pestle, and scooped thick coconut milk into the meen kuzhambu. She might see the ocean from her mom’s kitchen and knew precisely when the fishermen arrived with contemporary catch. Today, she is cooking with the identical spirit at Olai Puttu, a restaurant she runs together with 10 different ladies from refugee camps in and round Thoothukudi. “It is in our hands to make the best of this opportunity,” she says in musical Sri Lankan Tamil in regards to the newly-opened restaurant in Thoothukudi.
Olai Puttu serves genuine Sri Lankan meals, and is the brainchild of Thoothukudi MP Ok Kanimozhi. “It is funded by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and is supported by the NGO OfERR (Organization for Eelam Refugees Rehabilitation) and the Tamil Nadu Government,” says Ok Ratnarajasingam, the Livelihood Programme director at OfERR. “There are 59,000 Sri Lankan refugees in Tamil Nadu, spread across 102 camps,” says Ratnarajasingam. “Women there are good cooks, and they sell what they make at the camps, which are hugely popular.” The concept, in line with him, is to make use of this ability to offer the ladies a livelihood and higher progress prospects for them and their household.
Olai Puttu is the seed for this concept. The 11 ladies who work there, deal with every part themselves, together with cooking and ready. This was doable with a bit of assist. Ratnarajasingam explains, “They attended workshops at Regency Tirunelveli By GRT Hotels, and at restaurants such as Ente Keralam, The Marina, Anjappar, and Hot Breads in Chennai. M Mahadevan [of Oriental Cuisines] has even sent a chef to the restaurant to help them out in the initial days.”
The restaurant, primarily based in Thoothukudi, specialises in conventional Sri Lankan meals
| Photo Credit: N. Rajesh
The ladies take the primary bus within the morning from the Thappaathi, Mappilaiurani, and Thalamuthu Nagar camps the place they stay. “For now, we serve lunch and dinner,” Rohini explains. For lunch, there may be rice, fish, crab, prawns, and squid curry, a vegetable and keerai kootu, sundal, and maasi sambal (a dish of coarsely floor dried tuna, coconut, and shallots). A non-vegetarian meal is priced at ₹120, whereas the vegetarian model prices ₹90. The ladies make round 25 plates of sambal a day. Idiyappam, puttu, and parotta can be found for dinner, served alongside sodhi (a coconut milk-based stew), fish curry, maasi sambal and rooster curry. Dinner is priced at roughly ₹90 per individual. The puttu after which the restaurant is known as, is steamed in a neethu petti, an association woven with palm leaves.
The enterprise is supported by NGOs OfERR, UNHCR and Tamil Nadu Government.
| Photo Credit: N. Rajesh
Ratnarajasingam hopes that after enterprise takes off, Olai Puttu will unfold throughout Tamil Nadu. “Women from other camps can come to see how this restaurant functions, and they can learn to be self-sustainable. Even if they go back to Sri Lanka, they will have a skill at hand, and need not be refugees,” he says.
Dinner is priced at roughly ₹90 per individual.
| Photo Credit: N. Rajesh
What makes Sri Lankan delicacies totally different from Tamil Nadu’s, is the even handed use of coconut and coconut oil. “We add coconut milk to our fish curry instead of grinding it to a paste as is done here,” Rohini factors out. She hopes to step by step introduce extra dishes she grew up consuming. Among her favourites, aside from fish curry, are the greens that she cooked for lunch. “We would have one variety of keerai every day, and sometimes added shredded fish such as thirukka (stingray) and sura (shark) to them,” explains the 47-year-old.
The workforce is headed by 45-year-old Vasanthi Kokiladasan, who got here to India in 1999 from Mullaitivu. She received married in Tamil Nadu, and has three youngsters; meals at residence, therefore, encompass a mixture of Sri Lankan and native dishes. “I like Sri Lankan food more,” she smiles, including, “Nothing like a good prawn kuzhambu with puttu.”
It serves dishes such an puttu, idiyappam and meen kuzhambu ready by the ladies.
| Photo Credit: N. Rajesh
The tastiest Tamil Nadu dish Rohini has ever had, was method again in 2006. “I arrived on a boat at 6am from Sri Lanka in August that year,” she remembers. “We had started at 9pm the previous night, and I had my nine-month-old son in my arms.” Rohini and the others have been dropped off unceremoniously in the course of the ocean, the place the water was neck-high. “We made our way to Thangachimadam at Rameswaram, and then reached the Mandapam camp,” she provides. “It was here that we had our first meal after two days. They served karuvattu kuzhambu and rice. I can never forget the taste of that curry.”
Source: www.thehindu.com