Rand's Curry was a successful failure. The idea started with a way to deliver food in 2020 in the most efficient way possible. I called the business Rand's Curry Kitchen. I took a couple months taking all the pictures. I'm a solo act and it took a while to eat all that food. I worked out the double batch recipes making slight alterations where needed.
Send me an email on the Dot Trombone Contact Page if you'd like to have a curry dinner with me!
The menu is now a shopping list generator!
I originally wanted people to make their orders on my website the day before (or was it two days before?). I'd wake up at 4am like I usually do and make the curries for the day to be picked up in the evening. While the curries were cooling in the freezer (to preserve them by rapidly bringing the temperature down), I'd print out the shopping list that my website generates and do the shopping. I'd come back and move the curries to the fridge into quart mason jars like I always do. Then people would come to my place to pick them up. They could order a whole week of food. The department of agriculture vetoed my idea on the glass jars, so I bought a bunch of plastic. They also vetoed people coming to my home, so I bought a $5,000 electric car.
I only sold to a couple neighbors. Peter told me I was crazy because I didn't even know if my product was "viable". I don't understand that when people tell me that. I've been eating these every day for years. It's as good as any food I get in a restuarant. I've gone years without getting diarrhea. What more do you want? I mean sure, I could play it safe and make burgers. I don't make myself burgers that often though. You know, every few years I'll buy some beef and make a few burgers on the grill.
My whole life is like that story though. But the shopping list generator is great. I've been using it for almost 4 years now. It's always correct. For years, I never bought any vegetables that were not on the list and nothing went to waste. I was printing the list out on paper because I don't like taking my phone to the store because if I drop it, then I've messed up an expensive device. But I have been taking it to the store lately and that has helped because there seems to be limited selection at all the stores around here recently. It didn't used to be like that. I think it's just some political game, that these stores are trying to teach me some lessons. And I have learned some things from it. I hope they are learning from me too. I don't see much evidence of that yet.
The idea came up about a franchise thing with it. Home kitchens and all that. You know, ramping up the website to work for multiple places. It was taking credit card orders. I coded that with Stripe's Payment Intents. After a couple years, that system got spammed, so I took it down. I had a place on my website where you could buy dot trombone T-Shirts with a slinky on the back. Never sold any. I gave some to Goodwill and I still have one of them. I've got a stack of CD's I made that is full of my trombone music. Same thing, no one is interested. Not viable I guess. I have them on Craigslist now. $20, $10, $200. Doesn't seem to matter. No one seems too interested in this stuff. It's really odd if you ask me.
Am I really that different? Eating curries, riding a bicycle, meditating, playing trombone, playing acid jazz music? Do I have to play harmonica to be successful in the USA? I just don't get it. These curries are fabulous though, mostly due to Raghavan Iyer. He's incredible. The thing I have going on with the short grain brown rice takes it to a whole new level. I tend to still use white rice with curries, but I'm doing this thing with brown rice, potatoes and tortillas now. I add mustard seeds, mustard greens and dill to it. And I'm using Raghavan Iyer's Sambar Masala recipe in it too. I could go on and on...