Category: Vegan

Look what arrived! Vegan Serendib is here.

I was getting a little tired, so I almost didn’t make the kaliya curry, but then Kevin was willing to do all the prep for me, so I lay on the couch and watched Darby & Joan (Acorn TV, one season so far, set in Australia, retired nurse and retired inspector solve crimes while cranking at each other about their dubious life choices, fun) while he did all the work.

I did eventually take over the deep frying and the curry making, though. Eggplant, plantain, potato, in a sweet-tangy coconut milk gravy. I admit, I prefer the variant that adds chicken liver — I find that totally addictive. But for a big party, going with the still delicious vegan version seemed a better option.

More of yesterday’s cooking: green jackfruit & chickpea curry, curried lentils in coconut milk. The best part of making curried lentils for me is that I get to lick the spoon clean after transferring them out of the cooking pot. So yum.

Note that these don’t have photos, to keep the cover cost down as much as possible, but there’ll be a gallery of photos on my site. Exciting!

Launch date Nov 15 — is it too early to start your holiday shopping?

It’s a Vegan Serendib kind of morning — I made (and froze) pol sambol for the people who ordered the trio of sambols add-on in the Kickstarter, and they’ll definitely get seeni sambol (my favorite), and I haven’t decided yet which should be the third sambol. Something vegan, obv., so not kooni sambol, for example, even though Roshani made me kooni sambol for lunch the other day, and it was DELICIOUS.

(Her husband Tom made the dal, chicken curry, and green beans — I was very impressed and maybe a tiny bit jealous. His dal might be better than mine. Shhh… Kevin may have to up his Sri Lankan cooking game; he does a great beef and potato curry, my favorite, but it would be awfully nice to come home from work to a full meal of Sri Lankan food I didn’t have to cook myself…)

I’m also cooking this morning for a local reporter who’s doing a piece on the cookbook, so of course, I have to spend some time waffling about that as well. I think jackfruit & chickpea curry, and eggplant sambol, and rice, obv. I feel like I ought to make something green, but I don’t think I have kale on hand, which would be my go-to for kale sambol, or even green beans. Hm. Maybe we have pea pods. I should check.

But I’m not going to make myself crazed cooking lunch for one person, even if she’s a reporter, so I’ve deliberately taken myself out of the kitchen for at least an hour, to the shed, where I will work on novel revisions first. Be sensible, Mary Anne. She’s not expecting a maharajah’s feast, and you definitely don’t need to make a dozen dishes for one lunch. Do I have to lock you in the shed? I will, you know…

Oh, but maybe there’ll be a photographer, and they should eat too, so that surely justifies JUST ONE MORE CURRY…

(Um, I think I may have just discovered the title of my book of food essays…)

Look what just arrived! Unboxing day for Vegan Serendib!

Official ‘launch’ date is November 15th, but if you know me, you can get your copies earlier…

…and if you’re a reviewer or industry professional interested in a review copy, now is a great time to let me know. We’ll have hardcover, paperback, and digital review copies soon, though I admit, the print copies are pretty expensive for us to produce and ship, so if digital works for you, that’d be ideal.

I’ve finished going through the photos on Vegan Serendib, and I’m actually fine with most of them — I’m going to re-make hoppers this morning and try to get a better photo, and I’m hoping Stephanie Bailey can find a better photo of rich cake in my files, because I don’t particularly want to make rich cake again right now (totally the wrong time of year, feels weird!), but we’re really very very close to done.

It’s looking so pretty. I love paging through. I hope this makes lots of vegans very happy.

One of my priorities with Vegan Serendib is to make sure that it was as substantial a book as Feast — I didn’t want the vegan edition to be a lesser version. So it’s roughly the same number of total recipes, the same page count, etc.

But as we’re making final decisions this week, one question that arose was whether to change the paper type. For Feast, we used Ingram’s standard 70/105, the mid-range paper. Not quite as heavy or as bright-printing as their premium paper, but still quite nice.

Unfortunately, printing and production costs have gone up, due the pandemic inflation and supply chain issues, so we were faced with a tough choice — if we kept the 70/105 paper, we’d need to bump the hardcover price up by $5 in order to actually make even a minimal profit. The hardcover was already $40, and we’d have to take it to $45.

I didn’t want to do that — it felt like I was charging vegans more for their version of the book, which seemed unfair (even though it was really a matter of timing).

But we got Ingram to send us some samples, and thankfully, I think their standard paper is going to be just fine for this. I can see and feel a slight difference when I have them side by side, but the standard still looks good and feels substantial. You don’t want cookbook pages that are going to rip easily, especially if people may be turning them with wet fingers!

But I think this is going to be fine, so we’re going to go with the standard paper, and that means we can keep the price at $40 for the hardcover, whew.

Indexing and copyediting is done now, I think — we’re going to have our cover designer adjust for the new paper (which affects the thickness of the book and therefore the layout of the cover), and then I think we’ll be ready to order a galley print copy of the hardcover? And then Stephanie will work on the design for the print paperback? Getting close, folks. Exciting!