Cooking for Krishna is really not cooking at all. We are not actually only cooking, like the way an ordinary person might cook, we are preparing and offering our food and our actions to Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead.

There are so many nice things that you can make to offer to Krishna, but making them we should always start with the understanding that preparing food for Krishna is devotional service. Just exactly like any devotional service we might undertake, the most important ingredient is our devotion.

Krishna doesn't need anything from us, He doesn't need the food we prepare. He allows us to make and offer these things so that we become purified. The purification comes from our preparing the offerings, our offering them to god, and then accepting the remnants of the food that has been offered to Krishna, which is now prasadam or Krishna's mercy.

We all have to eat something to stay alive. So this process of offering what we eat to Krishna, and then in turn taking that food as
prasadam after He has accepted it, purifies our entire existence. This turns an ordinary, mundane, bodily necessity into an act of
devotion.

To make prasadam in the proper way we need first to remember this: Krishna doesn't need any of these things, He's allowing us the chance to serve Him. Therefore, every aspect of the preparation is a chance to serve Krishna.

When choosing your ingredients, you should select the best that is available because you are going to be offering it to Krishna. You
want your kitchen to be very clean, so the food you offer will be pleasing to Krishna. Srila Prabhupada said that anything (vegetarian
of course) can be offered from a clean kitchen, and nothing can be offered from a dirty one. Then of course you want your own body to be clean also. Cleanliness is one of the most important aspects of cooking for Krishna.

All these things that go into getting ready to cook can all be done as offerings to Krishna. It's not just the food that is an offering but the place it is prepared, your own self as you prepare it, and finally the way you prepare it. These can all be made part of your offerings, together they make up the final offering- The moment when you present your dish to the Lord.

As with any kind of devotional service, we want all our activities to be undertaken as offerings to Krishna. So you engage all your senses - mind and body. You utilize what you have, your clean kitchen, your money in the purchase of ingredients, your clean pots, your body in the activities of cutting and stirring and mixing. Everything that you have, everything that you do you offer to Krishna. You offer whatever you have, and you offer yourself through your actions.

In this way even the most simple things can be made into offerings for Krishna. It all depends on your consciousness, and your devotion. The devotion is manifest on the practical level through the careful attention to what you are doing, and thinking of Krishna, and remembering that you are doing this for Him. Then, no matter what you make, you will have made a lovely offering for Krishna. After He accepts it, then you take the remnants and become blessed by the mercy of the Lord in the form of prasadam.

There are currently no posts in this category.