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But I’ve actually been planning this for many many months, and even took a food writing class online with Pooja Makhijani, and while I had written a whole bunch of bits and pieces, none of them had really cohered into an essay yet.

BUT I had a little time tonight (thank you, grants folks, for an 11:59 p.m. deadline, much appreciated), so around 6:30, I told Kevin I was going to go hide in the shed and try to write something. Five hours later, having taken work heavily from various earlier projects that never quite cohered, I appear to have written a 4100 word essay that I’m moderately pleased with.

This is actually a tremendous relief, because I kept saying and saying that I was going to write food essays, but not actually doing it. Maybe I just needed a deadline to get me over the hump.

I could use a few beta readers before I try submitting it anywhere. Also, I have to research who publishes 4000 word food essays. If you’re interested in taking a look and sending me your thoughts, drop your e-mail in comments.

…

All the curry powder I roasted this weekend is spoken for now; very satisfying, getting it fresh and out the door quickly. (I’ll start prepping to roast another batch when the next order comes in…I’m out of cloves, so have to get some more of those first!)

Some curry powder packets were individual sales, but many were packaged with copies of Feast (hardcover and paperback). Three of those were birthday presents, which I find particularly lovely. What a nice thing to do for a friend, to introduce them to cooking a new cuisine.

Maybe I’m a little over-emotional, after long pandemic and with the election bearing down on us. It does make me happy, to see how in difficult times, we take care of each other and put in a little extra effort to strengthen bonds. Stronger together, right?

Woot — Montreal coverage for Feast! This is our first international coverage aside from the actual Sri Lankan coverage, so lovely to see. Canada peeps, look!

https://montrealgazette.com/…/six-oclock-solution-beet…

Although I have to note, someone wrote a subhead that says: “If you can’t find curry leaves, you can substitute them with lime zest and basil leaves in this recipe for beet curry,” and I disagree. If you can’t find curry leaves (they can be ordered online at Amazon and elsewhere), leave them out. I haven’t found anything that replicates that particular flavor.

And in fact, in the article itself, the writer includes this:

“Shopping for the essential seasonings is easiest in Indian stores, but supermarkets increasingly stock these products, says Mohanraj, who includes one of the best ingredient chapters I have ever seen in a book. Avoid yellow curry powder; Sri Lankans use dark-roasted, and she includes a recipe so you can make your own. Curry leaves come fresh, frozen or dried; if you can’t find them, skip them, Mohanraj directs.”

They also changed my recipe a bit, adding this parenthetical:

“green chilies (jalapeño, Anaheim, banana or poblano)”

Um, no. Serrano is your best bet for something readily available in North America, and what you’re ideally looking for is green fingerhot chilies. I wouldn’t use Anaheim, banana, or poblano, which have very different and distinct flavors.

I hope I’m not being churlish here — I do appreciate the coverage, very much. But it’s a little distressing seeing them leading people astray, flavor-wise. I know they want to be helpful, but I wish they’d dropped me a note to check these changes.

Six O’Clock Solution: Beet curry straight from Sri Lanka

Think of curry with a salty-sour-sweet taste and a bit more heat than in Indian cuisine, and you have the most popular dish from Sri Lanka, the island off the coast of India that was once a crossroads of European exploration and trade.

We’ll make it to professional eventually. Someday, I’d love to publish other peoples’ books too, but I figure we should make all the mistakes on my books first.

Hey, team. So I’ve been thinking about the timeline for Vegan Serendib and I think it’s putting too much time pressure on all of us to get that done, especially me and Stephanie, and there’s really no reason we have to have it for Christmas. We might get a few extra Christmas sales, but it’s not worth doing it badly or killing ourselves.

So I had another thought — since this is the second edition, one thing we could do is set a launch date for say, May 1, 2021, which gives us a proper six-month timeline for promotion. You can start working now on the press releases for that, and start sending them in the next few weeks, giving us a chance at some magazine coverage. We won’t have physical copies to send out right away, but should have them by end of the year, I think.

And then another thing we can do is start taking pre-orders AND say that anyone who pre-orders we’ll immediately send them a digital copy of the first sampler edition of Vegan Serendib (bonus), so they can start cooking right away. Then they’ll get the full volume next May. I think overall, that makes a lot more sense. What do you think?

If we do this, then I think the next step is to ask Stephanie to go back through what we did for Feast, and make a calendar for what we’re aiming to have done each month in the next six months. Some of the things:

plan some kind of holiday promotion for both books (Stephanie)

copyedit and proofread (Darius or Emmanuel or both? check with Jed re: errors from Feast we want to correct here too)

start writing food essays and sending them out (MA, who needs deadlines for this clearly, so maybe one every two weeks)

depending on COVID, maybe an outdoor in-person event in May for launch day?

And heck, while we’re calendaring, we can look ahead to the NEXT book, which should be Gluten-Free Serendib. Let’s say we aim for December 1, 2021 launch of that.

develop recipes for GF (MA)

draft press releases for GF, update press database, send out first wave

A Feast of Serendib was featured in Publishers Weekly’s Holiday Gift Guide under Cookbooks!

Holiday Gift Guide 2020: Nonfiction

These stellar books reveal the lives of myriad artists and writers, from rock stars to sommeliers and literary luminaries. Borges and Me: An Encounter Jay Parini (Doubleday) ISBN 978-0-385-54582-2, $27.95 In this astute memoir, novelist Parini writes of leaving Pennsylvania in 1971 to pursue a PhD in literature at St.