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My GOD, these are luscious. Here’s a Valentine’s Day present from me to you, folks. Thanks for reading all my babbling so patiently.

The marshmallows themselves are fluffy and tangy and fruity and delectable — then, when you add the creamy white chocolate (and a sprinkling of pink hearts and sparkly sugar), it just takes it over the top into pure decadence. I like these best of every confection I’ve ever made.

***

“I Plight Thee My Troth” Marshmallows
(rose, passionfruit, and vanilla / love, passion, and home)

3/4 c. passionfruit puree
3 packages unflavored gelatin
1/2 c. water
1 1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. light corn syrup
1 t. vanilla extract
1 t. rosewater
butter (for greasing the pan)
powdered (confectioner’s) sugar for dusting (about 1/2 c.)
about 1 – 1/2 c. white chocolate chips
pink hearts and sparkly sugar for decorating

1. Empty gelatin packets into bowl of stand mixer (whisk attachment), with passionfruit juice. Stir briefly to combine.

2. In a small saucepan (a bigger one will be heavy and hard to hold steadily at a later stage) combine water, sugar, corn syrup, and salt. Cover and cook over medium high heat for 4 minutes. Uncover and cook until the mixture reaches soft ball stage (240 degrees if you have a candy thermometer), approximately 8 minutes. Once the mixture reaches this temperature, immediately remove from heat; if it continues, it will swiftly turn into hard candy.

4. Turn mixer on low speed and, while running, slowly pour the sugar syrup down the side of the bowl into the gelatin mixture. (Be very careful with the sugar syrup, as it is scaldingly hot and will burn you badly if it gets on your skin.) Once you’ve added all of the syrup, increase the speed to high.

NOTE: The volume is a little more than usual for my marshmallow recipes, as I wanted these on the fluffy side, so have a dishtowel or splashguard ready in case of need; once the mixture starts thickening, you shouldn’t need it anymore.

5. Continue to whip until the mixture becomes very thick and is lukewarm, approximately 12 minutes. Add food color if desired — if not, they’ll be white. I added a bit of pink, for the romance of it all. Add vanilla and rosewater.

6. While it’s whipping, butter a large 9 x 12 pan. Prepare an oiled spatula. Pour the mixture into the prepared pan, spreading it evenly (and swiftly) with the oiled spatula.

7. Dust the top with enough of the powdered sugar to lightly cover. Reserve the rest of the powdered sugar for later. Allow the marshmallows to sit uncovered for at least 4 hours and up to overnight.

8. Turn onto a board, cut into squares, and dust all sides of each marshmallow with the remaining powdered sugar, using additional if necessary. (They are very yummy as is, so feel free to stop at this point.)

9. Melt white chocolate using either double boiler method, or at half power in the microwave (stirring every 30 seconds after 2 minutes until melted). Dip marshmallows and turn over to sit on parchment or wax paper.

10. Decorate with hearts and sprinkles before the chocolate sets up. Let set. May be stored in an airtight container for up to 3 weeks, or frozen (in a flat layer, with sheets of wax paper between).

I brought some chocolates over (along with rice and curries) to a friend going through a tough time last night. Is it any wonder that I love cooking so? You get to make beautiful objects, and also feed people. What could be better?

I have a bunch of computer work to do today, but Kavi and I have an after-school date to experiment with mango creams in milk chocolate. She’s not a dark chocolate fan yet, so this round of passionfruit-ginger-cashew dark chocolates has been a tiny bit frustrating for her. 🙂 (Anand is happy to eat the dark chocolate scraps left over….)

Most of these chocolates are intended for Bite Nite next Friday, but I have 5 sets put aside to sell (last pic). Still have to figure out pricing; maybe they just get sent along with cookbook orders for a week? But what about the poor people who already bought cookbooks? They should get to buy chocolates too…. We’ll see.

 

I meant to post about this last fall, but in the harried I didn’t manage it, but better late than never, and I just want to say that it was a pleasure and a privilege being part of Professor Anna Guevarra‘s innovative food course.

Honestly, when I saw what she was doing, I was both impressed and a little jealous that I hadn’t thought of doing something like that — you totally could, on the literature front, as well as with the sociology approach she takes, using food as a way in to cultural conversations and analysis. Although it’s also a lot of work, how she does it, and I’d need to do a lot of prep to be able to do it nearly as well — maybe someday!

A flash from the past — my birthday last summer, when various friends took me out for various lovely meals around town. This one was at MORA Asian Kitchen, Oak Park, a new addition to our neighborhood — I liked the poke-style appetizer the best. 🙂 Lovely to be reminded of warmth and fellowship in the darkness of winter.

Heather sent me a photo of her making the curry powder from my cookbook. 🙂 She doesn’t have a grinder (I use a coffee grinder I dedicate for spices), so she’s doing it old school, with mortar and pestle… Looks good!

Okay, here’s a question for all the indie publishers out there. I know that on launch day on Amazon (March 6 for A Feast of Serendib!), I’m supposed to encourage people to go flood Amazon with reviews (which they can’t publish there earlier), but also encourage people to buy books on Amazon.

My question is, is there a threshold I should be aiming for? A certain # that would = making it over some algorithmic magical threshold?

Guys, I’m a little worried that in the next six weeks, with the run-up to the Feast launch, that the marketing is going to get so intense that you’re going to get utterly sick of me. Um, you’ll tell me, right? Are the hashtags deeply irritating? (They make it easier for Heather to propagate appropriately, but I worry that they’re bugging people.)

I swear, I have to climb over an emotional / mental barrier every single time I post a blurb, or even a hashtag. Sigh.

#serendibkitchen

Seattle, Elliott Bay Book Company. I went by to drop off a copy of A Feast of Serendib, to ask whether they might want to do an event there if I came back. First of all, their cookbook section is very impressive — Seattle people must like to cook! (Long, dark winters…) And check out the big dedicated section on SE Asian cooking; that tells you where you should try eating out when you’re in town. 🙂

But the funniest bit was that way back in 1997, twenty-two years ago, I did a reading here when I was a student at Clarion West. And amazingly, the programming guy, Rick, actually remembered me from back then! How cool is that? (What I would give for a memory that worked that well…)

Rick’s even going to Sri Lanka in a few weeks, and we had a great conversation about his travels there, and about other Sri Lankan American authors he likes, and it was just very cool. I hope I can manage to fit in a Seattle trip for the book launch this year!

I’m reading through The Best American Food Writing 2019, edited by Samin Nosrat, whom you know I adore. So far, it’s not quite what I expected. Five pieces in, we have:

– a little funny piece about how we describe food, v. cute: “Imagine the agony of a ghost who is too nice to haunt anyone properly, and yet he tries and tries and tries for all of eternity. If you captured his flop sweat in a jar and put it under a heat lamp, it would turn — unfortunately — into the fermented dairy drink kefir.”

– a long, excellent, reported piece about the biggest irrigated farmers in the world (the couple who own POM Wonderful and many many nut groves) and who owns / controls water in California; really nuanced portrayal of their lives and the complexity of their attempts at philanthropy / sense of noblesse oblige with their mostly undocumented Hispanic workers

– a poetic, emotional piece about the eggs the author is no longer able to eat, connecting obliquely to her Nigerian culture

– another reported piece about the subtlety of heirloom Mexican beans, how one should cook them (very simply), and why it’s a struggle making them profitable, even though they’re now coveted by high end chefs and bean conoisseurs

– an examination of Finland’s exceedingly salty licorice, with some cultural analysis thrown in

They’re….hmm….more analytical than I was expecting, I think? More restrained? And I’m not sure if that’s reflecting Nosrat’s editing style and selections based on her taste, or if I’m just not familiar with what’s typically in this series; I might have to jump back a few volumes to compare.

But it’s a very far cry from the kinds of writing you see in most food blogs, to be certain (which often have a sort of breathless enthusiasm and fondness for adjectives), and even from anthologies like Eat Joy, which I finished a month or so ago. Maybe it’s a New Yorker thing? (Several of these pieces were originally published there.) There’s definitely a sense that Nosrat and these writers mostly move in a different world than I do, a world utterly immersed in professional food.

Roshani and I have been talking a lot lately about food writing, and the thing is, even though I’ve written a cookbook, and have a host of food-related essays in the works, I’m not sure I’m actually a food writer.

I’m…something else, I think, that intersects at times with food. A memoirist, perhaps? A cultural…not critic, exactly. Not translator. Something I’m having trouble finding a word for. Synthesist?

But I don’t think you’re going to see me writing a long reported piece anytime soon, or going deep into a specific ingredient, like onions, no matter how much I love them. That kind of food obsessiveness isn’t where my passion lies, though I can appreciate it in others. It’s a nice place to visit.

At SALA, my friend Nalini told me that she thought my writing was about…hmmm…I don’t know that I remember what she said, exactly. Lowering artificial barriers? Something like that. It rung true, whether I’m talking about being bi & poly, or about cooking unfamiliar food (or just cooking being an unfamiliar practice to you), or about letting your garden go a little wild…

Well. I’ll keep reading. We’ll see.

Anand makes the lasagne.

(I feel like that could be the title of a book.)