with Mary Anne Mohanraj
Little bits of cooking from the last few weeks. Seasoned onions, breakfast of mackerel & egg curry on toast, salad with apricots and blue cheese, breakfast of scrambled eggs, naan, and seeni sambol, Vietnamese-style spicy-sweet shrimp on rice.
Summer means I have more time to actually cook. It’s nice.
It’s always satisfying when I have to order another box of books because I’ve sold out. 
The paperbacks are smaller than the hardcover, because we left the photos out to help keep the price down — $30, instead of $40 (currently on sale for $25). I include a card linking to an online archive of all the photos; I don’t know if anyone actually uses that, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.
We do these print-on-demand, and we really weren’t sure how interested people would be, but despite the pandemic crashing straight into our March 2020 launch, we did have a burst of initial interest in the paperbacks, and had to re-order a few times early on:
September 2019: 50 copies
October 2019: 125 copies
December 2019: 112 copies
Now’s the first time I’ve had to order since then, though — we’ve sold through what, 287 copies so far? Make that 275, since there were some freebies that went to staff and reviewers. We are not setting the world on fire with this cookbook, but I’m still happy that people are buying it.
We got two boxes, another 56 books, in this order. Maybe we’ll break 300 before the end of the summer…
Two of the orders I’m shipping out today are birthday presents, which is particularly nice; there’s something very pleasing about my book being given as a birthday present. I hope it brings the recipient a lot of happy cooking moments…
(Also shipping out some of my homemade curry powder. I just roasted a new batch; my kitchen smells amazing.)
I’ve finished going through the photos on Vegan Serendib, and I’m actually fine with most of them — I’m going to re-make hoppers this morning and try to get a better photo, and I’m hoping Stephanie Bailey can find a better photo of rich cake in my files, because I don’t particularly want to make rich cake again right now (totally the wrong time of year, feels weird!), but we’re really very very close to done.
It’s looking so pretty. I love paging through. I hope this makes lots of vegans very happy.
So here’s my plan to convince Kavi to start making me salads — first I will start making fabulous salads, and then she’ll decide to make them, and I will lounge on the couch.
Tonight’s salad from the cookbook Mixt: grilled chicken and asparagus, roasted fingerling potatoes, cherry tomatoes, toasted pine nuts, shaved Parmesan, champagne-shallot-Dijon vinaigrette, local lettuce.
Kavi: Usually I eat the worst thing on the plate first, but I couldn’t pick anything, because it was all delicious!
My cunning plan is well set in motion!
Kavi (age 15, on summer vacation) has realized that she can cook anytime she feels like it. Which is great, except that mostly she wants to bake cookies. Which is also great — her first batch of shortbread was perfect — but as you can see from the fact that this many cookies had disappeared within the first hour of her baking them, we may be in some trouble here. We all really really like shortbread.
Oh well. It’s not the worst way to go… and hey, the first strawberries from the garden are ripe enough to harvest. Isn’t that lovely?
I wonder if I can convince Kavi that she really wants to learn how to make fabulous salads…
