Category: Dinner

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Sri Lankan Dal With Coconut and Lime Kale Recipe

I haven’t made this dish, but there are many Sri Lankans commenting on it, so I draw it to your attention. (Spoiler alert — they mostly don’t seem to love her version. The kale on the top is definitely not traditional, but in her defense, the intro does note that.)

(This is pretty different from the dal in my own cookbook. Which I think is delicious. But, y’know, I would. 🙂 )

Sri Lankan Dal With Coconut and Lime Kale Recipe

“Red lentils are the king of weekday cooking,” said Meera Sodha, the British cookbook author In this robust dish, she turns to quick-cooking red lentils, deepening their flavor with fried green chiles, garlic and ginger It’s not traditional to serve the kale on top, but it turns a simple dish into a luxurious, complete meal: Just add hot rice and a spoonful of yogurt on the side.

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A Nice Weekday Meal

This was a nice weekday meal. Start with Vietnamese-seasoned-sausage from the Girl and Goatceries, wrap around skewers, grill (I did it on a stovetop grill pan), turning to brown all sides. Delicious drizzled with chili oil, accompanied by fresh veggies, pickled onion and peppers, and a little leftover rice and chicken w/ green beans.

The kids loved the sausages, and I loved the combination of different kinds of elements on the plate.

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So Good, So Easy

I looked at a bunch of recipes with herbs and other seasonings, but in the end, I just used olive oil, salt, and pepper on the roast, and it was perfect.

Preheat oven to 375F, cut up red onion, carrots, gold potatoes, toss with seasonings and oil, pat dry Cornish hens and season the same way, roast for about 1 hr 15 minutes. If they’re not browned enough by that point, bump the temperature to 425F for five minutes or so at the end. So good, so easy. Dinner for four.

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Worth the Extra Step

This is the last of Kevin’s birthday meal kits from Girl and Goatceries, their SE Asian green beans. I’ve never used meal kits before — they’re pretty pricey, but on the other hand, they do seem like a great way to teach someone how to cook (or to remind yourself how to cook).

Taking some of the labor out of things like cleaning and prepping the green beans, or out of shopping for groceries, etc., makes it easier to actually get through a recipe. And their pre-made sauce was certainly convenient.

This one called for me to blanch the green beans, and I admit, I might normally skip that and go straight to sautéing, because it seems a little more fussy than I want to bother with. But y’know, if you blanch the green beans, you do get a lovely bright crispness to them.

So okay, when I have the time and energy, it’s probably worth that extra step. 🙂

Now I’m thinking about what I’d put together in a Sri Lankan meal kit, if there were such a thing….

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Hamming it for the Camera

I’ve been making a little bit of an effort to actually cook dinners this week, for Kevin’s 50th birthday week — we did pasta with a pork ragout, bangers and mash with a nice onion gravy and roasted Brussels sprouts, and in this case, pork fried rice (with lots of veggies snuck in) and chicken with broccoli.

(Usually these days I’m running so harried that they’re lucky if I cook one proper dinner a week, so I’m not sure the family quite knows what to do with all this bounty, but no one is complaining.)

Kevin loves Chinese food, and while I can follow a recipe fine, I’m still very clearly a novice on this front when it comes to improvising — but the fried rice turned out pretty okay. Practice. Using the wok and the super-hot big burner on our Wolf range definitely helped (the range came with the house, or we’d never have splurged on it, but glad it did!)

We added a mid-week family dinner this week, with candles and setting the table and checking in with the kids, which Kevin suggested and I think is a nice option for helping us get through e-learning. Makes me slow down a little bit too, which is undoubtedly good for me.

I’m mostly sharing these photos because the kids realized I was taking a picture of them and immediately started hamming it up for the camera. 🙂

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Nutella and… Italian Sausage?

Kevin decided the kids could use a mid-week treat, so made crepes + fillings dinner, which all of us love. I may have eaten several spoons of the apple filling straight up. Shh…. He is such a nice boy.

Anand’s newest food experiment — Nutella + Italian sausage. Um. MIGHT be okay? He ate it, anyway!

Please ignore my super-fuzzy hair. I blame the pool.

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How to Make Instant Pot Beef Smoore

Morning peoples! I meant to post this Sri Lankan beef smoore recipe on Saturday, because this Dutch-influenced dish is more of a Sunday roast sort of thing, but this weekend was VERY hectic for me, and I forgot. On the other hand, with so many folks working from home, maybe that’s less relevant than it used to be.

If you do it the old-school way, it’s long, slow cooking on the stovetop — with a slow cooker or Instant Pot, you can speed that up dramatically. Like most roasts, this is great for a luscious dinner, and the leftover slices makes fabulous sandwiches in the days after. It’s the sauce that really makes it spectacular. 

Link to the Instant Pot recipe at the YouTube site. The stovetop recipe is in my cookbook, A Feast of Serendib!

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Calm, Mary Anne. Calm

A little chaotic today, trying to prep for the TV show tomorrow (I’ll be on live TV, WGN’s Sunday Brunch segment, around 7:35 or so, teaching how to make kale sambol), while also attending ReconveneSFF convention (on a Wild Cards panel in a few hours), and also get the new 100 days challenge kicked off on my fitness group AND start a new writing accountability group, with a 100 days challenge too. It’ll all be fine, but it feels like a LOT of moving parts. 

Morning cooking was carrot and green bean curry, which I’m planning to have out on the counter tomorrow, as something you might include in a Sri Lankan meal, along with kale sambol.

Carrot curry was a staple of my early cooking and got me through a lot of grad school, sometimes alternated with green bean curry — at some point, I decided to try putting them together, since the cooking method is almost identical, and yup, I like it. 

Just cook the carrots for a while first, so they’re almost cooked through, then add the green beans and cook for a few minutes more. Yumyum.

http://serendibkitchen.com/20…/…/09/sri-lankan-carrot-curry/

Okay, going to go color my hair now, and then I need to prep the beef smoore, and test-run the actual video, and and and….well, we’ll see. One step at a time. Calm, Mary Anne. Calm.

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Easy Way to Feed the Kids

Lots of posting this morning, but now I’m going to turn off FB for a while and try to write. I leave you with a one-pot dish — take my Sri Lankan ginger-garlic chicken, cook it most of the way, add 1-2 cups of water, bring to a boil, dump in a bunch of leftover takeout rice, cook the water out, taste and add more salt if needed, stir in some frozen peas.

Easy way to feed the kids around here and also to use up leftover rice that’s starting to get dry.