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Sri Lankan Swordfish Curry

(30 minutes, serves 2)

I’m trying to start eating fish a little more regularly again — when I lived alone, it was one of my standard proteins in rotation, but Kevin doesn’t like seafood (alas), and so I’ve gotten out of the habit.

But fish is so good for you, and I do love it, so I think I’m just going to start making it more often; thankfully, Kevin’s perfectly capable of feeding himself (and the kids) as needed. The kids also aren’t so used to fish as a result of all this, aside from fish fingers, which they do like, so I feel like I need to start just including fish on the family rotation. Tuna noodle casserole, perhaps, to ease them in.

But for me, it’s hard to beat a Sri Lankan fish curry. I did a quick weeknight version of this on Tuesday, and less than 30 minutes later, was sitting down to eat fish curry and uppuma. Yum.

I just made enough for a few meals for me, so this is a pared down amount, compared to my usual recipes which are typically intended to feed 4-6 people. Dinner, plus lunch at work today, plus dinner again tonight, probably with a vegetable added. I’m thinking broccoli varai.

1 lb. swordfish (or other firm whitefish, like tuna), cubed
2-3 T oil
1 onion, chopped
1 t. black mustard seed
1 t. cumin seed
1 T garlic/ginger paste (you could chop fresh, of course, which is even tastier, but we keep a jar of the paste in the fridge for ease on busy nights — find it in the Indian store, or locals, they have it at Pete’s)
1/2 t. cayenne
1 t. Sri Lankan curry powder
1 T lime juice
1 c. water

1 t. salt

1. Marinate swordfish with cayenne, curry powder, and lime juice — this will flavor the fish and also firm it up a bit. If you have time, marinating it for 20-30 minutes will add even more flavor, but it’ll be just fine if it just sits while you’re prepping the onions.

2. Sauté onions in oil on medium, stirring occasionally, with mustard seed, cumin seed, and garlic/ginger paste. (If you’re being fancy, you could also add in a 2-inch cinnamon stick, 2-3 cloves, 2-3 cardamom pods. And 6-12 fresh curry leaves are always welcome.)

3. When onions are golden-translucent (5-10 minutes), add marinated fish, water, and salt. Continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until fish is cooked through and liquid has reduced to a nice curry sauce. Taste and adjust seasonings as desired — if it’s too spicy for you, a little coconut milk is always a nice addition.

4. Serve hot with rice, roti, pittu, uppuma, idli, or whatever grain your heart desires. If you’re making uppuma, you can do it in 5 minutes while the curry sauce is cooking down. Efficient! If you’re looking for an accompaniment, a bright mango pickle will go nicely.

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You Know How British Cooking and Detective Shows Are Great?

So you know how British cooking shows are great, and British detective shows are great? Well, I just finished watching an old series, Pie in the Sky (on Acorn), and it’s a British cooking + detective show, and it’s also great. But the one problem is that after pretty much every episode, I kind of wanted to have a pie — a steak & kidney pie, a shepherd’s pie, a fruit pie, etc. and so on. And mostly, I did not have pies on hand. Sadness. Woe.

But a few nights ago, I finally cracked. I remembered that I had some frozen Pillsbury pie crust that we’d bought for something at least a year ago and never used. And there was this chicken soup I’d made the other day, which was really closer to a stew than a soup, with plenty of potatoes and carrots in with the chicken, and that seemed like it was basically a chicken pot pie filling waiting to happen.

So I pulled out the pie crust and let it thaw for an hour, set the oven to 425F, and used a glass to cut out some circles and molded those into a muffin pan. Spoon some chicken stew in each one, stick them in the oven, and about 20 minutes later — slightly messy but yummy open-face chicken pot pies! Very nice with a bottle of rosé cider.

And I still had some pastry dough left, so I asked Kevin to cut up some apple into little cubes for me, and I rolled out and cut out more circles, into the muffin tin, pile in the apples, sprinkle some shredded cheddar on top, bake for 20 minutes again, and yum. Little apple & cheese pies!

My only problem is that we have now eaten all the little pies, I am now out of pastry dough, and I don’t have the patience to make my own anytime soon, I suspect. But on the other hand, I’ve finished watching the series, so it’s probably fine. 🙂 I’ll cook something else!

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George Loaned Me His Chef

George is really very sweet about helping to promote other writers’ work — even if that writer is writing a cookbook and not an epic fantasy novel. 🙂 He even loaned me his personal chef for the party — I’ve never worked with a professional chef before, and it was really interesting seeing Andrea Abedi’s approach to food prep.

We were all a little harried, so we didn’t get to talk food quite as much as I would’ve liked, but I’m hoping to go back to Santa Fe soon, maybe at the end of the summer — Andrea and her partner are opening a community kitchen, The Kitchen Table Santa Fe, so we thought we’d do an event there for Vegan Serendib when it launches. That’d be fun!

Funny side note: Kavi helped make the passionfruit marshmallows for the party, and was amused to tell her friends that she had made marshmallows for George R.R. Martin . 🙂

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I Want Cake

This weekend:

Kavi: I want cake.
Me: So have some cake.
Kavi: Do we have cake?
Me: No, but we can make cake.
Kavi: Do we have cake mix?
Me: No, sorry.
Kavi: That’s so complicated.
Me: Not really. [pulls out tea party cookbook and starts paging through]
Kavi, seeing lemon roulade: Oh, I want that one!

Me [not mentioning that I have never made a roulade before and I’m pretty sure we don’t actually have all the ingredients for one]: Sure.

*****

So we made the cake, and we didn’t have heavy cream, but between the lemon curd, cream cheese, powdered sugar, and coconut cream, we got to an approximation of a filling — well, more of a sauce, really. But we spread the sauce on the thin cake, and then we tried to roll it up, and it only cracked a little, which isn’t bad for the first attempt.

And we sliced it, and admired the spiral, and poured more sauce over it, and ate some, and it was just fine. A little claggy, perhaps, but satisfying the immediate need for cake. (Kavi and I did agree that it was not lemon-y enough, as lemon desserts so often aren’t, disappointingly, and we need to come up with our own recipe someday that will be lemon-y enough to satisfy us).

Then today, I had fresh strawberries on hand, and we had a few servings of lemon-coconut roulade left, definitely on the soggy side now, which to me, can only mean one thing — TRIFLE. Or at least, the sort of approximation of trifle that you get when you add fresh berries to cake and pour more coconut-lemon sauce over it. And Reader, let me tell you — it was DELICIOUS.

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Cooking Experiment Went VERY Well

Cooking experiment that went VERY well — my recipes for shrimp curry and cuttlefish curry are basically the same, though they end up tasting different due to the flavor of the base seafood. I happened to have a bag of shrimp and a bag of cuttlefish (aka squid, aka calamari) on hand, and I thought I’d try combining them. Reader, the end result was DELICIOUS.

Main concern is not cooking the seafood so long that it gets tough. So you essentially want to build the base sauce and get it to a good stage, add the shrimp and cook for 4-5 minutes, add the squid and cook maybe a minute more, and that’s it, you’re done! TASTY.

Buying all the seafood raw but already cleaned makes it easy. Be sure to thaw and drain if frozen — if you throw them in frozen, you’ll mess up the cooking times.

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Cute Little Quail Eggs

Cute little quail eggs, which I made for the Santa Fe retreat, planning to make Scotch eggs with them, aka nargisi kofta — and then I completely forgot them when packing! Alas!

It’s okay, they made good egg salad sandwiches when I got home…

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Dishes to Share

I was, of course, fretting about not having enough food at George’s Sri Lankan feast, so Roshani came to the rescue — she donated a beef curry for me to freeze and take down to Santa Fe, and then *she* was worried that there wasn’t enough of it, so we decided we’d reheat it with a little extra liquid and cook down some chopped potatoes in it when I got there. Worked great!

And really, it’d just be weird to have one person contributing all the dishes for a Sri Lankan feast. When my mom cooked for a big party, generally lots of the aunties and family friends brought a dish to share.

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Little Videos for TikTok

Emmanuel‘s been asking me to make more little videos that my Serendib peeps can use for TikTok, etc. This is lentil curry, aka dal, aka paruppu.

If you’re going to learn how to make one vegetarian Sri Lankan dish, this is the one I’d recommend — nutritious, delicious, and a staple across the island. You could live on paruppu and rice — and a lot of people do!

There are a lot of different preparations — mine is thick and luscious with plenty of coconut milk, like a porridge in consistency. Sometimes I eat it straight up with a spoon. 🙂