Month: February 2020

A few days ago I was talking with a writer friend about cooking. She wanted to write a cookbook of her family’s recipes, but was frustrated that her mother hadn’t taught her to cook.

My mom actually barely taught me how to cook; she would say “Just watch,” when I asked. She had me chop a lot of onions, and stir a lot of onions, and corrected me as I did that wrong (generally working too hastily, too carelessly).

Amma also told me a handful of recipes (usually without much in the way of measurements), but that was about it, in terms of explicit teaching.

But I ate her food every day for twenty years. More and more, I’m realizing that the real cooking lessons were embedded there. Amma cooks beautifully, deliciously, and as a result of all those meals, my mouth knows how our food is supposed to taste at its best.

Also, sitting around with her and my many aunties after a party, critiquing the dishes, was an education in itself. 

Woot! Our first GoodReads giveaway for A Feast of Serendib is live! (Over a hundred people have put in a request already, which is very cool. 🙂 )

Link to giveaway: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/303738-a-feast-of-serendib

Kevin and I have been talking a lot lately about the best use of my time as a writer / cookbook author, whether it’s worth making and shipping sweets.

I was talking to Chef Roel Estanilla at local Filipino pop-up pig & fire about some of these issues too — he makes these amazing ube cookies, and people have been asking if he’ll ship them. And I know Amanda Daly already has people asking if she’ll ship her delectable bagels (soon to be sold at The Daly Bagel in Oak Park!) But it’s not easy to make the math work out.

For example, hosting a sale like the current Valentine’s sweets sale takes me about, oh, 16 hours of cooking, tracking sales, communicating with people, packing things, actually mailing them.

If I make about $300 profit doing that (after taking out cost of supplies and shipping), that’s about $20 / hr as an hourly rate, which isn’t terrible, but honestly, my writing hourly rate is much higher, generally — somewhere between $50 – $100 / hr.

So holding these sales doesn’t make a lot of sense, money-wise, and of course, one thing we learned from the Kickstarter was that I had *way* too many rewards levels and really underestimated how much time handmade rewards took to make. Slow-roasting and grinding and packaging curry powder takes significant time! We’re pretty committed to not doing that kind of Kickstarter again, now that we have a better understanding of just how much time goes into it — it kind of ate my fall.

But when we were talking about all this yesterday, Kev pointed out that even if it doesn’t make a lot of money, hourly rate-wise, if I actually *enjoy* the cooking experiments and coming up with new recipes and having a quiet Saturday in the kitchen, puttering, that’s worth something too. It’s certainly nice to have something productive to do that doesn’t require staring at a computer screen, as so much of my work does, so the variation is worth something, even if it’s less profitable overall. (The kids like helping sometimes, and consuming the sweet experiments…)

And then I pointed out that it’s also good advertising, of course — posting about the sale gives me a reason to talk about the cookbook again. Any author can tell you that part of the reason there’s so much emphasis on book launch is that after that, it’s much harder to come up with good reasons to talk about your book. “It’s new!” is worth shouting about. “It’s been out a month!” is much less so. 🙂

So we have a very tentative plan to keep doing these sales, off and on. Only when I’m not feeling super-pressed for time, probably no more than once a month. Maybe less often this year, once the book tour details get finalized, since for at least some of those events, I’ll be making sweets and such to serve at book tour parties.

I would actually *love* to have some of my sweets out in the world more broadly, and there’s a little dream where I find someone to partner with who actually wants to take my recipes and make them in a more serious production-oriented way as part of a small business. It’d be awesome to sell them in local shops like the Happy Apple Pie Shop, Sugar Beet Food Co-op, Carnivore Oak Park, Wise Cup, etc.

The same thing with the curry powder, actually — wouldn’t it be awesome to have the curry powder (and sweets) available in Whole Foods? I’m picturing a Serendib Kitchen line, with pretty packaging and all.

(Oh, dreams of world food domination. You tempt me.)

But that’s definitely a more serious production than I have time for this year, and possibly ever — I’d really need someone else who wanted to do it, someone who was both a good cook and with good business skills, who could be my partner on that. I guess this post is both a warning that I won’t be doing these sales very often, and a little bit of an invitation too — if that business partner is maybe you, we should talk. 🙂

Two things that just make me happy:

– shipping out a new copy of Bodies in Motion, a book I published in 2005 — 15 years later, this book still has some legs. 🙂 I spent four years working hard on it, so it’s very pleasing to know that new readers are still discovering and hopefully enjoying it…

– the adorable little handmade label I got to stick on this package of assorted confections. A set of six of them came along with some glass spice jars I ordered, so I’ve just been randomly adding them to some of the packages I sent out this weekend. Small cutenesses that have no real purpose in the world but to make people smile…

(Sweets: “I Plight Thee My Troth” marshmallows (passionfruit, rose, and vanilla), “Starry Nights in Serendib” marshmallows (tamarind & chili), rose creams, and dark chili chocolates.)

Sigh — sometimes cooking experiments just fail, and it’s very sad. I HATE throwing food out, and usually I can salvage it *somehow*, but this just didn’t work.

I was aiming for a mango cream ganache — mangoes and cream and chocolate, as a filling for molded chocolates. But the mangoes & cream combined with the ruby chocolate (which I used for its fruity notes) to create an unappetizing brown, and even adding food coloring didn’t get it to a mango-ish color I was happy with. That wasn’t the real problem, though.

It didn’t *taste* like mango. I’d used frozen mango chunks, because y’know, this is the Midwest and it’s winter. Fresh, ripe mango is not easy to find here right now. And the result was just watery and lacking mango flavor and honestly, sad. I added some lemon zest, which helped perk it up a bit, but that made it even less mango-ish.

If I’d kept going, I would have produced the saddest mango creams ever. I’d have to name the recipe Mango Creams of the Miserable Homesick Diaspora.

I sighed, and poured it all down the sink.

I’m going to take another approach entirely — the delectable rose creams were made with a sugar paste of egg whites and powdered sugar and rose essence, so I’m going to try that, but with plenty of nice dried mango chopped up and stirred into the sugar paste.

That should be reliably tasty, fingers crossed, and as a bonus, will be more shelf stable than the cream-based version. (Though my chocolates should generally be eaten within 2-3 weeks regardless.)

Will report back on how the next batch goes — I have to swing by Pete’s first, get some spices for curry powder roasting, and look for their best dried mango.

I’ll try the ganache again at some point, but when I do, I’m going to use canned mango pulp — that works well for puddings and such, so I suspect it’ll be a better option. I may try blending with cream cheese instead of attempting the heated heavy cream + melted chocolate filling; that seems less liable to go wrong.

Probably too disheartened to risk it right now, though, esp. since I promised to get these chocolates out the door in time for Valentine’s Day.

Stephanie was setting up the Goodreads giveaway for Feast, and asked me if there was a secondary genre category for it beyond Cookbook, like Memoir or History. Honestly, it’s some of both, I think — I told her to add it to the memoir category.

A friend just messaged me this morning, after picking up another copy of the cookbook at the OPALGA+ potluck last night; she’d already bought the paperback, but is now gifting a hardcover to a relative. (Every writer should have such friends!) She said, “I’m looking through your cookbook, again appreciating so very much the work that you’ve done to share such treasures! And by that I mean the stories and histories as well as the recipes.”

And a memoirist friend of mine who’d stopped by to pick up some confectionery told me a few days ago that she was actually *reading* the cookbook, which wasn’t something she usually does with cookbooks…

All of that makes me so happy. It’s really what I wanted to do with this book, what all the months of research were for, reading through so many other versions of these recipes, trying to learn more about the food history of Sri Lanka & Sri Lankan diaspora culture. To convey more than just a few recipes — bringing in some of the immigrant experience, and the homeland culture it draws on.

I’m grateful to my academic training — I don’t think I realized when I was doing the work how much of putting together this kind of cookbook would call on those habits and skills of effective research, summary of significant points, synthesis into something that would be accessible to a broad audience. Several years of grad school and over a decade of teaching practice went into creating this, along with a few decades of cooking practice.

It’s a really good book, you know. (It feels weird and sort of shameless saying that, but I think that’s mostly cultural conditioning and I’m trying to put it aside. I did good work; it should be okay to say so.)

I worked on it so hard, so thoroughly, the way I did with Bodies in Motion during my doctorate. I was kind of exhausted when I finished it, and then there was the rush and anxiety of trying to find a publisher, etc. It’s only now, as the reader responses are coming in, that I can be reassured that I did what I was trying to do. I’m finally getting to be proud of it, which is lovely.

Of course, because I apparently can’t just let anything rest, I’ve started taking notes for the second edition, should one ever exist. Because I’m already coming up with variations on the recipes that I’d like to add, and new recipes that I wish I’d put in (Jed, can you please note in that file that I really need to add a recipe for Milk Rice?).

But more than that, I’d love to go a little more in depth in a few of the header notes to the recipes — most of them do offer some memoir or history or both, but a few, especially of the earliest recipes, are a little more purely functional. And it’d be nice to add a little more family immigration history too…

I don’t want to make the book too big, though! It’s already quite large. 🙂

Hey, Stephanie kindly set up a Goodreads giveaway for me for A Feast of Serendib, but I admit, I’m not entirely sure how this works, or how to best tell people about participating in it.

But the plan is that we’ll be giving away 5 hardcover copies of Feast to Goodreads members in the U.S. (International shipping costs, bah.) It’ll start at 12 a.m. PT on Monday, February 10, and finish at 11:59 p.m. PT on Wednesday, February 26.

I’m not actually sure what you do to be entered in the giveaway. Help??

UPDATE: solved!

Potluck cooking. In theory, one should only cook one dish for a potluck, but how can you serve beef smoore without also serving rice? 🙂 We did cashews, dried cherries, and rose essence in the rice, along with veggie broth and a stick of butter, to make it rich and indulgent.

I also pulled some jackfruit & chickpea curry out of the freezer, to make sure we had a nice vegan option to go with the rice. There aren’t a lot of vegetarians at our Midwest potlucks, I’ve found, but they’re so grateful for a yummy vegetarian dish (that isn’t just pasta or salad), it’s well worth a little extra trouble.

(Three, three dishes cooked. Ha ha ha ha ha….)

Thanks to Kev for cutting up the beef to make it easier to serve at a potluck! Best of husbands.

(The beef smoore recipe is in the cookbook. You can even do it in an Instant Pot — see my serendibkitchen.com site. The jackfruit curry is too, though without chickpeas — I’ll be posting the chickpea variation here sometime this weekend.)

NOTE! If you missed yesterday’s sale, I’m going to go ahead and extend it ’til 5 p.m. today, because I realized it won’t really affect my ability to get orders out on time. As detailed below…

Finishing up making sweets this morning — orders are mostly ready to be packaged up, though I need to finish a few sweets this afternoon. Next step for most of these is wrapping, which is fun; I love wrapping things in tissue paper and tucking in postcards and such; it feels like holiday gifting. Sending a little love out into the world. (I am such a sap.)

Around 10:30, I head into campus to teach, so will teach a few classes, and then be home around 2:30. I should be able to cut the marshmallows and toss them in powdered sugar then, also dip them in chocolate and decorate the tops.

Tonight, we’re hosting an OPALGA potluck (LGBT folks in the area, all are welcome to our monthly potlucks; it’s a great party with lots of very nice people and tons of yummy food — would love to have you join us), so I”m hoping to pack all this up and move it into the basement before 7.

(I should also cook something for the potluck — I’m tentatively thinking a big pot of beef smoore with rice, and I also have some jackfruit & chickpea curry in the freezer that I can pull out for the vegans.)

Then tomorrow morning, I have an iGov meeting from 8:30 – 10:00 (part of my library board responsibilities). After that will come packing up for shipping, which is slightly less fun than wrapping — I need to figure out what size boxes are the right ones to use, to be most efficient with shipping costs. Somehow that’s always harder than it ought to be.

Once that’s done, though, I can write back to people and tell them how much their final cost will be, so hoping to finish that by midday Saturday. (I may be able to figure that out sooner; we’ll see.)

And then by 5 p.m. Saturday, go to the post office, ship them out. That’ll be satisfying. 🙂