Author: Mary Anne

This is exciting! Food Network included my cookbook, Vegan Serendib, on a list of Top Ten Vegan Cookbooks of 2022!

“Author, novelist and post-colonial academic Mary Anne Mohanraj’s latest cookbook reads like a vegan love letter to her native Sri Lanka and its diaspora. She distills thousands of years of vegetarian and vegan culinary traditions into a vibrant tome of more than 108 recipes. The dishes are geared toward exploring the vast riches of Sri Lankan vegan cuisine through both her mother’s cooking and her own American adaptations. Start with the master recipe for Sri Lankan curry powder, which underscores one of the signatures of Sri Lankan cooking — dark roasted spices — and your curry dishes will be all the better for it. We’re particularly excited to try Kaliya Kari, an eggplant, plantain and potato curry, as well as Palakkai Kari, a green jackfruit curry that Mohanraj suggests pairing with kale sambol, pickled beet salad, and rice for a nourishing weeknight supper.”

Link in comments!

A second lovely 5-star review of Vegan Serendib on Amazon — keep the reviews coming, folks! They make a huge difference to visibility / discoverability! (And they don’t have to be 5-stars, really. )

“Mary Anne is an artist in the kitchen (I’ve had the privilege of sampling many of these dishes prepared by her hands), and this book is a gift to the world for vegans like myself! Also makes a great holiday gift (and a delightful incentivizing nudge for on-the-fence omnivores).”

Yes, we’re still shipping out Kickstarter and pre-orders of Vegan Serendib. We will be doing this until the end of time.

No, not really, Stephanie Bailey assures me that we’re more than halfway through at this point, and of course, when I say we, I mostly mean her, because all I do is wander through periodically and sign / personalize things for her. She’s doing all the hard work.

The really tricky part is organizing it — it’s nice to give people options, but the options multiply the complexity, and there end up being gazillion different packages, which definitely slows things down a lot. This is a particularly challenging task for an ADD brain; I get super-confused, super-fast, because every time I lose focus, I have to start over. Oof.

On the other hand, it’s lovely to be able to pack up personalized books — someone from South Africa sent a book to someone in Edinburgh, hoping the book would remind them of their honeymoon in Sri Lanka, which is terribly sweet. And some orders get curry powder, and some orders someone got a paperback for themselves and a hardcover gift for someone else, and it’s just nice being able to give people what they actually want.

AND we’re getting to the point where some of the orders will have soaps and tea towels and such in them, so that’ll be fun too. We probably won’t get to that before I leave town for Thanksgiving, but it’ll be the first thing I do when I get back, so they should all go out in good time for holiday delivery.

Little pleasures — I ordered a roll of ‘signed by the author’ stickers, to have on books I’m selling at events, dropping off at bookstores, etc. Very satisfying putting them on this morning.

This batch will be going over to local store Carnivore Oak Park, probably later today.

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!