with Mary Anne Mohanraj
I got to write a gift card yesterday (you can add on a handwritten message on a gift card for a dollar when you order Vegan Serendib or Feast from me), and it was fun. 
This one was a card I’d designed, based on a picture Kavi drew, of a little fire lizard, cupped in a brown hand, lighting a candle. Seasonal, too…hope they like it!
Aw, someone left a really lovely first review on Vegan Serendib. I’m blushing. (Reviews are SUPER-helpful, but please don’t feel like you need to write one this extensive — a sentence or two is just fine!)
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“I’m not sure I’ve ever reviewed a cookbook before, so please bear with me. Also, I should note that while Ms. Mohanraj and I have not met in person, we have had several interesting conversations on Facebook Messenger when I had questions about recipes from her blog. I was also a supporter of both this book, Vegan Serendib: Recipes from Sri Lanka, and her first cookbook, A Feast of Serendib on Kickstarter.
That said, I was really knocked out by Vegan Serendib: Recipes from Sri Lanka! There are so many recipes in there that I want to try, especially as I have been trying to get more non-meat foods into my diet. I’m especially looking forward to trying some of the eggplant, beet, Brussels sprouts, okra, and cauliflower dishes since those are among my favorite vegetables. Savory dishes, however, are not the only things that Ms. Mohanraj covers. She also covers breakfast dishes, party dishes, desserts, and beverages.
In this volume, she keeps the storytelling to a minimum, which I kind of miss because she is an excellent storyteller, but I understand that she opted to include more recipes instead. She also has a small glossary, beautiful pictures of the foods, and advice on substitutions, which is very helpful for those of us not living in Sri Lanka.
I have no idea how she made the time to do this book: Ms. Mohanraj is not only a cookbook author, she writes science fiction/fantasy, runs several organizations promoting Desi literature, is a full professor of literature, has sat on a library board, and on a school board. She also designs beautiful fabrics, and now has taken on running a small press. Just listing all she does makes me dizzy!
Still, I hope she writes more cookbooks and explores her culture in them more deeply. If you like cookbooks, ethnic foods, excellent writing, and information, this is a book you need to add to your cookbook shelf and use often.”
My kitchen smells so good. 
We spent a few hours toasting spices for the Vegan Serendib Kickstarter orders and pre-orders, and I’m grinding this morning. Nummy.
Well, THAT is nice to see. Does that mean I get to call it an Amazon bestseller now?
Aw, you guys. Vegan Serendib has jumped to #45 on Amazon in Indian Cooking, Food & Wine (I mean, it’s not Indian, but we’ll let that go…), and perhaps more impressively, #327 in Vegan Cooking (Books). Thanks so much to everyone who pre-ordered, who ordered on launch day, who ordered today, who orders tomorrow….
Ordering details in comments. Please like / comment / share!
I have a full house working here this morning — Stephanie is pictured here, learning how to make my roasted curry powder. We made a lot already! But it’s all gone, and we have a lot more Kickstarter orders and pre-orders to fulfill; trying to get them out as quickly as we can!
Here’s a recipe for you — Sri Lankan roasted curry powder. If I remember, I’m going to be posting free recipes all launch month, just to give y’all a taste of the book. (*Taste* of it, see? I’m funny.) Please like / comment / share for visibility!
(Also, did you see my previous post that Feast is 30% off on Amazon today? What a deal! Ordering links in comments.)
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Master Recipe: Sri Lankan Curry Powder
One of the main characteristics of Sri Lankan cooking is that the spices are often dark roasted. You cannot simply substitute yellow curry powder! If your local Indian grocery store carries Jaffna Curry Powder, that’s from northern Sri Lanka and an excellent option; my curry powder can also be bought in our online shop (but only shipping within the U.S.). Or you can always make your own; home cooks will generally have their own variations!
1 c. coriander seeds
1/2 c. cumin seeds
1 T fennel seeds
1 rounded t. fenugreek seeds (aka methi seeds)
1 cinnamon stick, about 2 inches
1 rounded t. whole cloves
1 rounded t. cardamom seeds
2 T dried curry leaves
2 rounded t. cayenne
1. In a dry pan over medium heat, roast separately the coriander, cumin, fennel and fenugreek, stirring constantly until each one becomes a fairly dark brown. Do not attempt to save time by roasting them together – they each have different cooking times and you will only end up half-cooking some and burning others.
2. Put into blender container (I use a coffee grinder that is dedicated solely to spice grinding) together with cinnamon stick broken in pieces, the cloves, cardamom and curry leaves.
3. Blend at high speed until finely powdered. Sieve into a bowl, discarding any large pieces, and combine with chili powder; stir well. Store in airtight jar.
(We know that some folks like a lot of heat and some prefer less. We don’t add any cayenne to our curry powder so that you can adjust the heat level to your own preference by adding as much or as little as you like. In Sri Lanka we use about 1 – 2 teaspoons per 4 – 5 oz. batch.)
Vegan lunch for Vegan Serendib’s launch day, of course.
• curried beets
• leeks fried with chili
• kale sambol
• lime-masala mushrooms
…all on a bed of rice, as is traditional, but if you’re aiming lower-carb, you could skip the rice and serve in a bowl with more of the kale sambol as your base.
(And if you’re aiming vegetarian instead of vegan, you can top with a fried egg…)
Launch day for Vegan Serendib, my Sri Lankan vegan cookbook!
This has been a long road, people, from first drafting Feast, to launching it March 2020, to pandemic, to carrying on with Vegan — it doesn’t feel quite real yet. And yet, it is. Woot!
A few notes:
• if you’ve already bought Feast, you should know that there are 80 recipes in common between the two cookbooks. If you’d like the 40 new recipes developed for Vegan Serendib, you can certainly buy a copy (and they look very nice on the shelf next to each other), but you can also wait a few weeks for the digital supplement we’ll be putting out, _A Slice of Serendib_ (I think is the tentative title).
• if you’re planning to buy Vegan on Amazon or other online retailers, for yourself, for gifts, etc., it would be SUPER-HELPFUL if you can order it today, as a burst of orders help bump up the book’s visibility in the rankings, making it much more likely that people who don’t know me personally will actually see it.
• if you’d like to buy it directly from me, that’s great too (we get a little more money per book), and there’s a link in comments.
• if you buy it (and/or Feast) directly from me, and you live in the U.S., you can also add on some of my homemade curry powder
• if you already have a copy of Feast and/or Vegan and feel moved to leave a review — even just a single line — on Amazon, that’s also SUPER-HELPFUL. Once you hit a critical mass of reviews, that also moves the book up in Amazon’s visibility algorithms.
Please like / comment / share for visibility — tell your friends, tell your family, tell the world. Thanks!
Yesterday was one of those days that just went super-fast, one thing after another. I made Sri Lankan lunch for six, cooking way too much, just as my mother trained me — you want an abundance of food at a party, so no one hesitates to go back for seconds.
– Sri Lankan red rice & basmati rice, with saffron and sultanas
– tamarind pork curry
– classic chicken curry
– curried beets with green chili and coconut milk
– kale salad with coconut, onion, & cherry tomatoes
– mushrooms sautéed in butter, curry powder, and lime
– chili leeks
– yogurt (just in case it was still too spicy for anyone)
– toasted naan (from Whole Foods)
– mango fluff for dessert (not pictured)
I cooked the pork curry Thursday night, but the rest was cooked Friday morning in a bit of a mad frenzy. It would’ve been calmer, but I had a Serendib Zoom meeting in the middle of the morning, and not one I could skip, since we’re prepping for launch of Vegan Serendib on Tuesday! It felt weirdly appropriate that I was cooking throughout that meeting.
I was in a bit of a strange mood all day, I think because it was my mother’s birthday. Amma has moved to a memory care facility, and while we’re still figuring it all out, it’s looking like she’s probably going to need to continue living there, for her own health and safety. She isn’t able to answer the phone and understand me at this point; I thought about trying to call, but I didn’t think there’d be any point to it. I’m not sure she really recognizes me when I come to visit.
But my sister and her family were able to visit yesterday, along with my aunt and her son, and the staff took a nice photo of them all. I wish Amma could’ve joined us for lunch yesterday. She would have liked tasting the food — the chicken curry and leeks in particular, are exactly how she used to make them. All my cooking skills — the flavors, the complexity, the ability to cook masses of food at speed — start with her.
A little more cooking from yesterday — this is one of my favorite Sri Lankan accompaniments, leeks fried with chili. I like it for two main reasons:
a) it’s great to have a spicy accompaniment, so that if you’re serving a large group and some people might not want spicy and some might, you can make the other dishes on the milder side, and then this goes well with almost everything to bring the heat for those who want it
b) although the recipe says 50 minutes, most of that you can be doing other things — there’s only about 10 minutes of active cooking, when you’re slicing the leeks, washing the grit out, and starting the sauté with spices. AND, if you’re willing to stand and stir on higher heat, you can knock it out much faster — I think the whole thing took me about 20 minutes yesterday, so I was able to make it while the rice finished cooking.
Recipe link in comments.