Author: Mary Anne

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The Only Problem with Eggplant Sambol

The only problem with making eggplant sambol, is that after I rub the eggplant slices in turmeric and salt, let sit for an hour, blot away the excess bitter water that’s been drawn out, and then fry them, there is a good chance Kavi will come by and excitedly eat a bunch of the eggplant ‘chips’.

This is not actually a problem. 🙂 Salty fried is something she reliably loves, and I’m just glad that she gets a little nutrition from the eggplant.

Whatever eggplant chips she leaves me get tossed with sliced onion, lime juice, a few chopped green chilies, and a few tablespoons of coconut milk, just to bind it together. A really nice contrast on a rice & curry plate!

(Recipe in both Feast and Vegan Serendib.)

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A Standard Colorful Vegetable Poriyal

Cooking from yesterday — this is just a standard vegetable poriyal (you’ll find the base recipe in both Feast and Vegan Serendib). Sauté onions, garlic and ginger with cumin and mustard seed and curry leaves in vegetable oil, add chopped small veggies of your choice, salt and usually turmeric, but I actually skipped the turmeric this time, because I was just loving the colors of this so much, and I wanted to keep them nice and bright.

Little purple fingerling potatoes, bright orange carrots, green pea pods. So pretty. 🙂

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Peach Harvesting this Weekend

They’re in various stages of ripeness, and the ones that are mostly green, we’ll leave on the tree a little longer, but dozens of them are ready-ish, and some of them, the squirrels have knocked down and those need to be collected. (shakes fist at squirrels)

Plans for the peaches:

– really underripe: turn into green peach salad (like South and Southeast Asian green mango or green papaya salad, but with peaches), or green peach pickle

– slightly underripe: either put in a paper bag and leave on the counter to hopefully ripen over the next few days, or grill, which brings out the sweetness

– perfectly ripe: eat straight up

– slightly overripe or bruised: cut up and make peach jam, peach crisp, peach ice cream topping, peach quick bread, etc….

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Accumulating Sri Lankan Dishes

It just makes me happy when the island is accumulating a wide variety of Sri Lankan dishes. Not that wide — I’m restraining myself. But so far, digging through the fridge for whatever groceries I had on hand, I’ve cooked:

– potato, carrot, and pea pod poriyal
– mushroom and green jackfruit curry
– ripe jackfruit curry (I wanted the reporter to have a chance to taste the difference, and I happened to have some on hand)
– coconut sambol

Umm…it’s all spicy; I wasn’t really thinking about it, and ended up going pretty authentic on the heat levels. I hope she likes that. Well, the next two won’t be spicy:

– eggplant sambol (only a little green chili! you’ll barely notice it!)
– rice!
– (oh, and I have some potato sothi in the fridge, I can pull that out too…)

And I have some mango sorbet going in the freezer, that I *think* will be ready in time, and if she likes, I’ll make her a cocktail or mocktail. Many options there, so we’ll see what she feels like.

Little bits of Sri Lanka everywhere in this house, not just on the island. Isn’t the new little elephant on my door adorable? The door is actually held on by a magnet, and comes off entirely, so you could ‘open’ it, in theory. This Etsy shop makes the cutest doors:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/BlueToucanStudios

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Just One More Curry

It’s a Vegan Serendib kind of morning — I made (and froze) pol sambol for the people who ordered the trio of sambols add-on in the Kickstarter, and they’ll definitely get seeni sambol (my favorite), and I haven’t decided yet which should be the third sambol. Something vegan, obv., so not kooni sambol, for example, even though Roshani made me kooni sambol for lunch the other day, and it was DELICIOUS.

(Her husband Tom made the dal, chicken curry, and green beans — I was very impressed and maybe a tiny bit jealous. His dal might be better than mine. Shhh… Kevin may have to up his Sri Lankan cooking game; he does a great beef and potato curry, my favorite, but it would be awfully nice to come home from work to a full meal of Sri Lankan food I didn’t have to cook myself…)

I’m also cooking this morning for a local reporter who’s doing a piece on the cookbook, so of course, I have to spend some time waffling about that as well. I think jackfruit & chickpea curry, and eggplant sambol, and rice, obv. I feel like I ought to make something green, but I don’t think I have kale on hand, which would be my go-to for kale sambol, or even green beans. Hm. Maybe we have pea pods. I should check.

But I’m not going to make myself crazed cooking lunch for one person, even if she’s a reporter, so I’ve deliberately taken myself out of the kitchen for at least an hour, to the shed, where I will work on novel revisions first. Be sensible, Mary Anne. She’s not expecting a maharajah’s feast, and you definitely don’t need to make a dozen dishes for one lunch. Do I have to lock you in the shed? I will, you know…

Oh, but maybe there’ll be a photographer, and they should eat too, so that surely justifies JUST ONE MORE CURRY…

(Um, I think I may have just discovered the title of my book of food essays…)

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Pistachio Margarita Float

(makes one giant dessert drink)

Ready to be indulgent? When my daughter and I were traveling in Sri Lanka, she decided that Sri Lanka was the land of ice cream, because we ended up eating it most places (especially when the dishes were too spicy for her). I wouldn’t serve her this drink, but for an adult libation poolside, this lush concoction will delight. (The pistachio margarita is still tasty, even if you skip the float entirely.)

3 oz. tequila, chilled
1.5 oz. pistachio orgeat (syrup)
1 oz. fresh lime juice
dash of Strongwater’s Virtue bitters (rose, alpine, and sage) (optional)
2 oz. lemon-lime soda
lime and sugar for rim
pistachio ice cream (or to kick it up a notch, use bastani: Persian pistachio-rose-saffron ice cream, see below)
chopped pistachios and/or rose petals for garnish

1. Rub fresh lime along rim of cocktail or margarita glass, and dip in sugar.

2. Combine tequila, pistachio orgeat, fresh lime juice, dash of bitters, and lemon-lime soda.

3. Top with scoops of pistachio or bastani ice cream, garnish with chopped pistachio. I recommend serving with a spoon and/or straw.

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Bastani: Persian Pistachio-Rose-Saffron Ice Cream

8 egg yolks
2 c. sugar
2 c. whole milk
1 c. chopped roasted pistachio nuts (salted is fine)
1 t. vanilla extract
1/2 t. rose extract (or 2 T rose water)
1/2 t. cardamom extract (optional)
generous pinch saffron threads
pinch salt

2 1/2 c. heavy cream

1. Beat egg yolks with sugar until smooth and foamy.

2. In a medium thick-bottomed pot on medium-low, heat the milk to boiling while stirring. Add vanilla extract, rose extract, cardamom extract, saffron threads, and salt.

3. Slowly and carefully, pour the foamy egg/sugar mixture into the fragrant milk, using a whisk vigorously while pouring (to avoid scrambling the eggs).

4. Turn heat to low and continue heating, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until custard thickens. (It should thinly coat the spoon).

5. Pour custard mixture into a bowl, and refrigerate until well chilled (at least 4 hours, and overnight is not unreasonable.)

6. Churn in an ice cream maker (be sure bowl has frozen for at least 4 hours, overnight is likely better), or hand-churn (stick in freezer and stir every 30 minutes to break up the ice crystals, until it is well-mixed).

7. When ice cream is at soft-serve consistency, stir in chopped pistachios, then freeze until hard (about 2-4 hours).

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Vegan Serendib Now Available for Pre-Order

Vegan Serendib is now available for pre-order through Ingram and on various online bookseller sites. Woot!

Request? It would be IMMENSELY helpful if you left an honest review — even a sentence is great. If a book gets enough reviews, it makes it much more visible in the online bookseller search rankings.

I *think* you can review even before the Nov 15 launch date, so if you’re one of the Kickstarter backers who gets your book much sooner, or a book reviewer, please do feel free to review early!

(I’m a Chicagoan, with our…complex…history of voting, so I had to resist the urge to say ‘early and often’. 🙂 )

Amazon: https://smile.amazon.com/Vega…/dp/1733040935/ref=sr_1_1…

Also available on my site, of course: https://serendibshop.com/…/vegan-serendib-recipes-from…

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Gooseberry, Rose, and Violet Iced Fairy Cakes

I didn’t write up a recipe for this, because all I did was use a standard fairy cake recipe, add a little rose to the batter, and then divide the icing and flavor it with gooseberry + citrus, rose, and violet. But they’re charming, no? Would be fun for a tea party, or a kids’ birthday party.

Honestly, the rose ones and the violet ones are a little sweet for me, but I love me the tang, so gooseberry+citrus is my jam. These would also be good with jam. 🙂

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/fairycakes_93711

For the Spring/Summer Patreon boxes — alas, it is too late to sign up for those now. New sign-ups will get the Autumn box, probably somewhere around November.

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High Summer: Rose, Elderflower, and Indian Gooseberry (Cocktail & Mocktail)

I wanted to see just how floral & delicate I could go with a cocktail, while still retaining some interesting complexity.

This one is for those up to a cocktail challenge. The first step is finding Indian gooseberries (Phyllanthus emblica) — an easy task in South Asia, where amla, as they’re known there, are widely available and tremendously important to Ayurvedic medicine. Amla has a massive amount of vitamin C: one 100g serving of amla berries (about a half cup) provides 300mg of vitamin C—more than twice the daily recommended value for adults.

If you do a little research in medical journals, you’ll see a host of other health benefits associated with it. I’m not a doctor and can’t speak to those, but amla’s tart / bitter flavor makes Indian gooseberry an interesting component in a cocktail or mocktail. In South Asia, amla is used widely in cooked dishes such as chutneys, pickles, etc.; people also drink the juice, often blended with a sweeter juice or with added honey. It’s a little intense straight up!

Amla shouldn’t be confused with European (Ribes uva-crispa) OR American gooseberry (Ribes hirtellum), which are different plants altogether. (There are lots of plants around the world that go by the name ‘gooseberry’.) Amla grows on trees, and is a fairly large fruit; European gooseberries, which are wildly popular in a host of desserts and other preparations, grow on bushes. There was even a ‘gooseberry craze’ in the early 1800s in Europe.

American gooseberries also grow on bushes, but they’re very hard to find, as they were federally banned in the U.S. in the early 1900s, due to their propensity for a fungal disease called white pine blister rust; white pines were valuable construction materials. The federal ban was lifted in 1966, but some states still ban them. You can occasionally find European gooseberries in America, though — usually relatively small green berries, with a sweet-tart flavor.

Now back to the Indian gooseberry — how do you find it? Well, what I really wanted to find was Ceylon gooseberry (Dovyalis hebecarpa), but so far, I’ve had no luck in Chicagoland. But I did find Indian gooseberries frozen in the local South Asian grocery store, and that’s where I’d recommend you start your search. You can also buy them dried online, and then reconstitute them; you can even purchase Indian gooseberry powder. I haven’t tried either of those, though!

*****

High Summer Cocktail

2 oz. vodka, chilled
1/2 oz. St. Germain elderflower liqueur, chilled
1/2 oz. elderflower & rose syrup
3 Indian gooseberries (for 1/2 oz. juice)
ice cube and rose for garnish

1. Make juice: Remove flesh from gooseberries, discarding inner seed (similar to an apricot pit). Chop coarsely, then blend with 1 c. water. Strain and discard pulp, saving the juice.

2. Combine vodka, St. Germain, elderflower & rose syrup, and 1/2 oz. of gooseberry juice. Serve with an ice cube and rose petals (or a mini fairy rose, in this case) for garnish.

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High Summer Mocktail
4 oz. elderflower lemonade soda
2 oz. gooseberry juice (see previous)
1 oz. elderflower & rose syrup
ice cube and rose for garnish

Make juice, then combine ingredients in a cocktail glass. Serve with an ice cube and rose petals (or a mini fairy rose, in this case) for garnish.