16th October 2020 – Thava Indian Restaurant

From the Guests’ perspective, an Odd Plate Dinner appears to be all about good food prepared by top South African Chefs to support an important charitable cause.

Of course, in reality a lot of hard work and planning are taking place behind the scenes, to make it happen. It is much more than a Odd Plate Dinner fundraising…

Early start

Every day, the Nosh teams start with early morning collections of items to be rescued from supermarkets, wholesalers, farmers, agents, markets and other sources of salvageable produce. Their ‘harvest’ ranges from perfectly edible and nutritious fruits and vegetables to products which have reached their “sell by” dates but are still safe and edible, goods which were overstocked or perhaps damaged or mis-labelled goods.

There are many reasons for food to be discarded and not nearly all touch on safety!

The teams are not only picking up surplus food; they are also spending a lot of time building relationships with the various donors and their staff as well as educating and encouraging them to donate while the food is still edible. Should this threshold of edibility be exceeded, such food is distributed to local farmers for animal feed or composting, amongst other closed-system solutions.

Only a tiny fraction of what the Nosh teams collect is sent to the Odd Plate kitchen for the day. Any produce which is not selected for the dinner, does not go to waste but gets cooked up at the Community Kitchen for distribution to the soup kitchens, shelters and feeding schemes serviced by (in this case) Thava Indian Restaurant.

The Challenge

As exhilarating as any “Leftovers Mystery Box Challenge” episode on MasterChef, the four top South African chefs, in this case Chef Owen Jullies, Chef Fungai Muzorewa, Chef Philippe Frydman and Chef Heinz Brunner only discover their available ingredients in the morning.

They then put their collective creative brains to the test and come up with a menu for the event. The October menu created by the Chefs and students looked as follows:

  • Entree:
    • Cheese-stuffed Jalapenos
  • Starters:
    • Two chilled soups – creamy Green Asparagus and rich Beetroot
  • Main course(s):
    • Chicken Biryani
    • Tacos with Coleslaw and refried Beans
    • Samp Risotto
    • Spiced Chickpea and Lentil Curry with assorted Sambals
    • Stuffed Zucchini
    • Thai Vegetable Cakes
  • Dessert:
    • Swiss Roll and Lamington layered Trifle