Thai Balcony Mini Mart, 40 Monmouth Street, Bath. There is also another very small (strangely named) shop selling authentic Chinese ingredients: Friends Forever, St James Parade, Bath.     

Ok - so how did I do it? Well to be honest its called winging it! You'll need a beer to carry on.....

Having decided what type of curries I wanted to do I trawled through this site to find a base and recipes that I liked the look off. One thing I find about the recipes posted is that they rarely give the quantity of people it is cooked for. This made life much harder. I also had to stick to recipes where I had a chance of getting all the spices from my local Morrisons/tescos etc. We are in the sticks!

I did a dry run of the recipes chosen to see what the quantities where like.  I then started by making 10 x the quantity stated. I had already worked out how much chicken i needed and so added this to what I had made. I then made more sauce or added more chicken by sight really until I got the quantity I needed. Baring in mind that it was lunch time and most people were in their 70's I knew they wouldn't eat loads and I thought they would probably have a little of each. I did the same with the vegetable curry adding chick peas at the end when it didn't look enough. I froze the batches.

I managed to feed them all for about ?2.00 per head having got loads of lovely veg from the market. I know it wouldn't have been anywhere as good as my local restaurant doing it for me but I saved ?400 by doing it myself!!! My biggest cock up was over doing the rice. I was cooking it in huge batches and thought it would take much longer then it did. I provided 80 poppadoms, a vat of chutney and raita.

Friends said there was no way I had enough but I knew it was OK but to be sure as I served the food I said "a bit of each!" to encourage them! Lots of people had seconds so plenty enough and obviously not too bad tasting either! 

I don't think that's really much help but if anyone wants anymore specifics then let me know! (Being an expert now  )

Well I did it! Big thanks for all the help. I ended up making a veg curry, a meat curry, dhall, raita, rice, chutney and poppadoms. Not bad for a madly busy, middle aged mother of three even if I do say so myself! 

Stupid question alert  : After you have added the veg - surely you need to add liquid - I'm assuming water just to cover top of veg? First base I have made so want to be sure.

help much appreciated!