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Found these cubes of ginger-garlic paste at the local Pete’s grocery store, tried them last night — good! We sometimes buy the jars of ginger-garlic paste, but it’s not as good as fresh. This is closer to fresh, and a sanity saver when you’re trying to get a quick curry out on a weeknight.

I ate really well yesterday at the Global Asian Studies start of semester potluck. My plate was very full, so please imagine me eating rice and chicken curry and okra-potato fry (pictured), but also spam musubi, green chicken and chili tamales, a fabulous matcha and fruit curd cake, homemade bread with homemade ramp butter…I pretty much rolled out of that potluck. Very happily.

This department, we know how to eat! Lovely to catch up with colleagues and students again…

Poor Stephanie is trying to get out my cookbook orders on a dining table that’s just covered in ornaments. Oops. We’ll get a tree today or tomorrow, and then decorate over the weekend, so by Monday, the table should be clear again. She seems to think she can manage.

Pictured here, a LOT of curry powder. She came in, looked at what I’d packaged up, shook her head dubiously, and said she thought we’d need more. Roger, wilco — guess I know what else I’m doing over the weekend.

Toasting seeds for curry powder — before & after. We’re hoping to get the rest of the Kickstarter cookbooks out by Wednesday, fingers crossed, and I needed to make more curry powder…

Stephanie is coming by shortly; our main goal for this morning is to get the rest of the international orders out the door, so they arrive in time for the holidays.

Well, that’s nice to see — Vegan Serendib, still holding IngramSpark’s #1 and #2 positions in Indian and South Asian Cooking.

I mean, it’s not kazillion units, as you can see, but it’s not nothing. And I’m hoping we’ll sell quite a few more as we approach the holidays and Christmas shopping kicks into full gear.

(IngramSpark is the big printer / distributor we use.)

My kitchen smells so good. We spent a few hours toasting spices for the Vegan Serendib Kickstarter orders and pre-orders, and I’m grinding this morning. Nummy.

Still sick with a cold, but clearly no longer exhausted, as I had plenty of energy to make brunch for the family, AND send two e-mails I’d been avoiding afterwards. Yay, me.

Plan for today — keep going on clothing sort; I’m down to workout clothes at this point, so almost done. I have a date with some friends for online board gaming at 1 (at Board Game Arena), which should be fun. I think we might teach a couple of them Wingspan.

Oh, speaking of gaming, while sick yesterday, I played two games of TM with the Hellas expansion and corporate era rules (against the computer), which gives a bunch more cards than the basic game, which is good for me getting used to playing with them before I play Alex again, because I think some of his consistently stomping me is because he just knows the cards a lot better than I do. I played two games as Saturn Systems and Ecoline, and in both of them I managed a much more developed science game than usual (easily passing 7 science tags) and ended up breaking 200 on both, which I don’t usually do. So that was nice.

Sometime today, if I don’t get tired, I’d like to start actually exercising again — I kind of fell off the wagon when ChiCon started, and I can feel the difference in my body. No good. Tentative date with Anand for pool fight at 4-ish, which should take care of it.

And if I get really ambitious, I might do a little writing — my workshop actually really liked the food memoir piece I gave them, which was very good, because I had worked on it for so long, I was ready to give up on it in despair. They think it just needs a little tweaking before it’s ready to send out. Which means I need to figure out the right markets for a literary food memoir piece (around 5000 words). Onwards, I suppose.

*****

“In my mother’s kitchen, the cupboard held a lazy susan stuffed full of little glass jars, bottles that had once held boullion cubes, labels rinsed off. When you opened the door, complex spice scents rose, mingled with the tang of tamarind that had somehow always dripped from the container. Jars full of whole spices and ground, both individual and blends: cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves, mustard seed and cumin seed and fenugreek, chili powder and turmeric and more.

Amma had strict rules for which ones you used when, but none of the jars were labelled — she just knew the difference. Some nights, I’d sneak into the kitchen and reach to the back of the cupboard for her precious dark jaggery; I’d hack off pieces with the biggest knife, addicted to its complex palm sugar sweetness, then sneak it back in, hoping she wouldn’t notice…”

You get a pic of me along with the meal I served the reporter yesterday, because I knew she’d be taking photographs so I actually changed out of grubby summer garden clothes for a change. I really go a little wild / feral in the summer. But look, clean hair! Earrings that match my dress! So fancy.

One of the things we talked about was how there aren’t any recipes using meat substitutes in Vegan Serendib — no Beyond meat, etc. I thought about using those, but a) they’re often expensive, b) they’re not commonly used in Sri Lankan cuisine, and c) there’s SO MUCH that’s inherently vegan in Sri Lankan cuisine, that you just don’t need meat substitutes to make large, satisfying, varied and interesting meals.

Neither she nor I are actually vegan, so another thing we talked about was how we definitely want to feel full and satisfied after a vegan meal. For this meal, the jackfruit & mushroom curry takes that role — it’s the main ‘entree,’ as it were, and you could just eat that with rice and feel satisfied. (Adding chickpeas or cashews to the curry would make it even more substantial.)

Of course, I wanted to let her taste lots of different dishes, and usually you’d have at least a few accompaniments to the meal in Sri Lanka. Sambols, pickles, etc. I was just cooking out of what I had in my fridge, so this is what I ended up with:

• red & white rice combo (Sri Lankan red rice has a lower glycemic index than white rice, and I’ve taken to doing half & half with white basmati when I make rice these days)

• jackfruit & mushroom curry

• mixed vegetable poriyal (potato, carrot, and pea pod)

• potato sothi (a coconut creamy, fenugreek-heavy mild dish)

• eggplant sambol

• ripe jackfruit curry

• coconut (pol) sambol)

Not bad for a few hours of cooking. If I hadn’t run out of onions AND coconut milk, though, I would’ve been tempted to make just one more curry….probably lentils / paruppu / dal, which would have made the meal even more filling.

It was interesting talking to the reporter yesterday about jackfruit — she’s a very accomplished chef (much more than me), but hasn’t really worked with jackfruit. I told her that yes, you could often find jackfruit nearby at Pete’s or Tony’s grocery stores, if you wanted to buy fresh and break it down, but to be honest, that’s a lot of work, and mostly, I like to just keep jackfruit on hand in forms that are easy to work with.

So for green jackfruit, that’s cans, usually packed in brine (it shouldn’t be very salty, but taste before adding more salt in your recipe, just in case). It’ll be cut up already — sometimes I cut it up a bit more, but you can just toss it in too. For this recipe, which is the most substantial element in my vegan meal, I combined the jackfruit with mushrooms, but you could also add chickpeas and/or cashews, if you wanted even more substance and protein. Eggplant also works well with this. Trader Joe’s reliably has green jackfruit cans, and honestly, I find it in most of our local grocery stores these days.

Using exactly the same curry sauce, you get a very different result if you use ripe jackfruit, which is fruity, like ripe mango. It works really well as an accompaniment; I wouldn’t usually use ripe jackfruit curry as the main entree, but it’s a bright, sweet note on the plate. You could also do ripe jackfruit pickle, of course, if you wanted more tang. This is much easier to make if you just buy frozen ripe jackfruit and cook with that; that’s getting easier to find — I’m pretty sure I just got this at my local Whole Foods, but if not, then Indian grocery stores are a good bet. You can also get ripe jackfruit in cans, but they’s usually packed in syrup, so I’d drain the syrup (save it for a dessert or cocktail component) before using the jackfruit itself in a curry.

If you’re vegan or vegetarian, I strongly recommend trying both green and ripe jackfruit, if you haven’t yet! And even if you aren’t vegan or vegetarian, they’re both delicious, so you should try them too.

All of these options are available on Amazon too.