Category: Vegan

I thought I’d try something in January — posting 30 vegan Sri Lankan recipes from the new cookbook, which will hopefully entice people to try them. (If I get busy, they may spill over into February, but I’m going to do my best to do one a day!)

I’m going to try to take little cooking videos too, as I have time, so look for those as well. My versions won’t be fancy, but I imagine Emmanuel will dress them up for other use.

Happy New Year!

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Sri Lankan Milk Rice / Kiri Bath

(with Bottle Gourd (Labu) variation)

(serves 4, 25-40 minutes)

Kiri bath (pronounced ‘buth’), rice cooked with coconut milk, is an essential part of Sinhalese culinary tradition in Sri Lanka. It’s a required element on New Year’s Day (celebrated in April on a lunar cycle), and often eaten on the first day of each month. Kiri bath is generally served with lunu miris or other spicy sambols, although some prefer it sweet, with jaggery.

Sri Lanka has been a multi-ethnic society for over 2000 years, and when my parents’ Sinhalese neighbors made kiri bath, they would always bring some over to share with their Tamil friends.

I didn’t grow up cooking it myself, but it was always a particular treat when my Sinhalese friends made it for me. I love kiri bath with pol sambol plus a nice curry, and a little paruppu (dal / lentils) never goes amiss. Maybe a bit of brinjal moju (pickle) too!

I ran across an interesting variation through a cooking video (by Chandeena and her mother at Village Life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EYvQ3S9ayU), where you add bottle gourd to the dish — it lends a lovely delicacy to the finished kiri bath, and may also serve to lighten it up a bit, for those who love the richness of flavor, but are perhaps being careful about their portion sizes of luscious rice and coconut milk.

Ingredients:

2 c. short grain white (or red) rice
3 c. water
2 c. coconut milk
1 1/2 t. salt
2 c. shredded bottle gourd (or cucumber), optional

1. Put rice, bottle gourd (if using), and water in a pan and bring to a boil; cover, reduce heat to medium, and cook 15 minutes. The rice should be mostly cooked at this point, but it’s fine if it’s a little firm still. (Red rice may want an extra 5 minutes.)

2. Add coconut milk and salt, stir well. Cover the pan again, turn heat to low, and cook for a further 10-15 minutes, until the milk is entirely absorbed. (Red rice may want an extra 5 minutes here too.)

3. Traditionally, you’d let it cool a little, turn it onto a flat plate, and smooth it (using a spatula or banana leaves) into a firm, flat round. Mark it off in squares or diamond shapes, and serve with your favorite sambols.

This is exciting! Food Network included my cookbook, Vegan Serendib, on a list of Top Ten Vegan Cookbooks of 2022!

“Author, novelist and post-colonial academic Mary Anne Mohanraj’s latest cookbook reads like a vegan love letter to her native Sri Lanka and its diaspora. She distills thousands of years of vegetarian and vegan culinary traditions into a vibrant tome of more than 108 recipes. The dishes are geared toward exploring the vast riches of Sri Lankan vegan cuisine through both her mother’s cooking and her own American adaptations. Start with the master recipe for Sri Lankan curry powder, which underscores one of the signatures of Sri Lankan cooking — dark roasted spices — and your curry dishes will be all the better for it. We’re particularly excited to try Kaliya Kari, an eggplant, plantain and potato curry, as well as Palakkai Kari, a green jackfruit curry that Mohanraj suggests pairing with kale sambol, pickled beet salad, and rice for a nourishing weeknight supper.”

Link in comments!

A second lovely 5-star review of Vegan Serendib on Amazon — keep the reviews coming, folks! They make a huge difference to visibility / discoverability! (And they don’t have to be 5-stars, really. )

“Mary Anne is an artist in the kitchen (I’ve had the privilege of sampling many of these dishes prepared by her hands), and this book is a gift to the world for vegans like myself! Also makes a great holiday gift (and a delightful incentivizing nudge for on-the-fence omnivores).”

Yes, we’re still shipping out Kickstarter and pre-orders of Vegan Serendib. We will be doing this until the end of time.

No, not really, Stephanie Bailey assures me that we’re more than halfway through at this point, and of course, when I say we, I mostly mean her, because all I do is wander through periodically and sign / personalize things for her. She’s doing all the hard work.

The really tricky part is organizing it — it’s nice to give people options, but the options multiply the complexity, and there end up being gazillion different packages, which definitely slows things down a lot. This is a particularly challenging task for an ADD brain; I get super-confused, super-fast, because every time I lose focus, I have to start over. Oof.

On the other hand, it’s lovely to be able to pack up personalized books — someone from South Africa sent a book to someone in Edinburgh, hoping the book would remind them of their honeymoon in Sri Lanka, which is terribly sweet. And some orders get curry powder, and some orders someone got a paperback for themselves and a hardcover gift for someone else, and it’s just nice being able to give people what they actually want.

AND we’re getting to the point where some of the orders will have soaps and tea towels and such in them, so that’ll be fun too. We probably won’t get to that before I leave town for Thanksgiving, but it’ll be the first thing I do when I get back, so they should all go out in good time for holiday delivery.

Little pleasures — I ordered a roll of ‘signed by the author’ stickers, to have on books I’m selling at events, dropping off at bookstores, etc. Very satisfying putting them on this morning.

This batch will be going over to local store Carnivore Oak Park, probably later today.

I got to write a gift card yesterday (you can add on a handwritten message on a gift card for a dollar when you order Vegan Serendib or Feast from me), and it was fun.

This one was a card I’d designed, based on a picture Kavi drew, of a little fire lizard, cupped in a brown hand, lighting a candle. Seasonal, too…hope they like it!

Aw, someone left a really lovely first review on Vegan Serendib. I’m blushing. (Reviews are SUPER-helpful, but please don’t feel like you need to write one this extensive — a sentence or two is just fine!)

*****

“I’m not sure I’ve ever reviewed a cookbook before, so please bear with me. Also, I should note that while Ms. Mohanraj and I have not met in person, we have had several interesting conversations on Facebook Messenger when I had questions about recipes from her blog. I was also a supporter of both this book, Vegan Serendib: Recipes from Sri Lanka, and her first cookbook, A Feast of Serendib on Kickstarter.

That said, I was really knocked out by Vegan Serendib: Recipes from Sri Lanka! There are so many recipes in there that I want to try, especially as I have been trying to get more non-meat foods into my diet. I’m especially looking forward to trying some of the eggplant, beet, Brussels sprouts, okra, and cauliflower dishes since those are among my favorite vegetables. Savory dishes, however, are not the only things that Ms. Mohanraj covers. She also covers breakfast dishes, party dishes, desserts, and beverages.

In this volume, she keeps the storytelling to a minimum, which I kind of miss because she is an excellent storyteller, but I understand that she opted to include more recipes instead. She also has a small glossary, beautiful pictures of the foods, and advice on substitutions, which is very helpful for those of us not living in Sri Lanka.

I have no idea how she made the time to do this book: Ms. Mohanraj is not only a cookbook author, she writes science fiction/fantasy, runs several organizations promoting Desi literature, is a full professor of literature, has sat on a library board, and on a school board. She also designs beautiful fabrics, and now has taken on running a small press. Just listing all she does makes me dizzy!

Still, I hope she writes more cookbooks and explores her culture in them more deeply. If you like cookbooks, ethnic foods, excellent writing, and information, this is a book you need to add to your cookbook shelf and use often.”

Well, THAT is nice to see. Does that mean I get to call it an Amazon bestseller now?

Aw, you guys. Vegan Serendib has jumped to #45 on Amazon in Indian Cooking, Food & Wine (I mean, it’s not Indian, but we’ll let that go…), and perhaps more impressively, #327 in Vegan Cooking (Books). Thanks so much to everyone who pre-ordered, who ordered on launch day, who ordered today, who orders tomorrow….

Ordering details in comments. Please like / comment / share!

I have a full house working here this morning — Stephanie is pictured here, learning how to make my roasted curry powder. We made a lot already! But it’s all gone, and we have a lot more Kickstarter orders and pre-orders to fulfill; trying to get them out as quickly as we can!

Here’s a recipe for you — Sri Lankan roasted curry powder. If I remember, I’m going to be posting free recipes all launch month, just to give y’all a taste of the book. (*Taste* of it, see? I’m funny.) Please like / comment / share for visibility!

(Also, did you see my previous post that Feast is 30% off on Amazon today? What a deal! Ordering links in comments.)

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Master Recipe: Sri Lankan Curry Powder

One of the main characteristics of Sri Lankan cooking is that the spices are often dark roasted. You cannot simply substitute yellow curry powder! If your local Indian grocery store carries Jaffna Curry Powder, that’s from northern Sri Lanka and an excellent option; my curry powder can also be bought in our online shop (but only shipping within the U.S.). Or you can always make your own; home cooks will generally have their own variations!

1 c. coriander seeds
1/2 c. cumin seeds
1 T fennel seeds
1 rounded t. fenugreek seeds (aka methi seeds)
1 cinnamon stick, about 2 inches
1 rounded t. whole cloves
1 rounded t. cardamom seeds
2 T dried curry leaves
2 rounded t. cayenne

1. In a dry pan over medium heat, roast separately the coriander, cumin, fennel and fenugreek, stirring constantly until each one becomes a fairly dark brown. Do not attempt to save time by roasting them together – they each have different cooking times and you will only end up half-cooking some and burning others.

2. Put into blender container (I use a coffee grinder that is dedicated solely to spice grinding) together with cinnamon stick broken in pieces, the cloves, cardamom and curry leaves.

3. Blend at high speed until finely powdered. Sieve into a bowl, discarding any large pieces, and combine with chili powder; stir well. Store in airtight jar.

(We know that some folks like a lot of heat and some prefer less. We don’t add any cayenne to our curry powder so that you can adjust the heat level to your own preference by adding as much or as little as you like. In Sri Lanka we use about 1 – 2 teaspoons per 4 – 5 oz. batch.)