Potluck cooking

Potluck cooking. In theory, one should only cook one dish for a potluck, but how can you serve beef smoore without also serving rice?  We did cashews, dried cherries, and rose essence in the rice, along with veggie broth and a stick of butter, to make it rich and indulgent.

I also pulled some jackfruit & chickpea curry out of the freezer, to make sure we had a nice vegan option to go with the rice. There aren’t a lot of vegetarians at our Midwest potlucks, I’ve found, but they’re so grateful for a yummy vegetarian dish (that isn’t just pasta or salad), it’s well worth a little extra trouble.

(Three, three dishes cooked. Ha ha ha ha ha….)

Thanks to Kev for cutting up the beef to make it easier to serve at a potluck! Best of husbands.

(The beef smoore recipe is in the cookbook. You can even do it in an Instant Pot — see my serendibkitchen.com site. The jackfruit curry is too, though without chickpeas — I’ll be posting the chickpea variation here sometime this weekend.)

Sending a little love into the world

NOTE! If you missed yesterday’s sale, I’m going to go ahead and extend it ’til 5 p.m. today, because I realized it won’t really affect my ability to get orders out on time. As detailed below…

Finishing up making sweets this morning — orders are mostly ready to be packaged up, though I need to finish a few sweets this afternoon. Next step for most of these is wrapping, which is fun; I love wrapping things in tissue paper and tucking in postcards and such; it feels like holiday gifting. Sending a little love out into the world. (I am such a sap.)

Around 10:30, I head into campus to teach, so will teach a few classes, and then be home around 2:30. I should be able to cut the marshmallows and toss them in powdered sugar then, also dip them in chocolate and decorate the tops.

Tonight, we’re hosting an OPALGA potluck (LGBT folks in the area, all are welcome to our monthly potlucks; it’s a great party with lots of very nice people and tons of yummy food — would love to have you join us), so I”m hoping to pack all this up and move it into the basement before 7.

(I should also cook something for the potluck — I’m tentatively thinking a big pot of beef smoore with rice, and I also have some jackfruit & chickpea curry in the freezer that I can pull out for the vegans.)

Then tomorrow morning, I have an iGov meeting from 8:30 – 10:00 (part of my library board responsibilities). After that will come packing up for shipping, which is slightly less fun than wrapping — I need to figure out what size boxes are the right ones to use, to be most efficient with shipping costs. Somehow that’s always harder than it ought to be.

Once that’s done, though, I can write back to people and tell them how much their final cost will be, so hoping to finish that by midday Saturday. (I may be able to figure that out sooner; we’ll see.)

And then by 5 p.m. Saturday, go to the post office, ship them out. That’ll be satisfying. 

Valentine’s/Galentine’s Day Flash Sale

Valentine’s / Galentine’s Flash Sale: $10 off most books, plus sweets!

Place orders in comments here, will confirm, then PM to arrange payment details via PayPal or Venmo. Sale ends @ midnight tonight, though sweets may run out sooner. Shipping & handling will be calculated on receiving order — usually $5-$8 within the U.S.

SWEETS:
(sets of four, $10 per set, 2 sets for $18, 3 sets for $25)

 

a) “I Plight Thee My Troth” Marshmallows
(rose, passionfruit, and vanilla / love, passion, and home)
– 14 sets left

b) passionfruit, ginger, and cashew-filled dark chocolates
– 1 set left

c) chili chocolates
– 1 set left (but if there’s a lot of interest, I can make another batch today)

d) rosewater cream chocolates
– 5 sets left

e) mango cream chocolates
– 5 sets left

f) tamarind-chili marshmallows
– 15 sets left

g) assorted (chef’s choice, four different sweets)
– 12 sets left

BOOKS:

A Feast of Serendib hardcover: $30
A Feast of Serendib paperback: $15
Bodies in Motion hardcover: $15 — Sri Lankan American immigrant stories about love and family
Perennial paperback: $7 (regular $12) — a little garden romance

CURRY POWDER:

4 oz. bag: $8

#serendibkitchen

Sunday dinner: pork with sweet orange sauce

Sunday dinner this week, both Kavi and I were busy with something, so it ended up being Anand and Kev doing the cooking, in a somewhat minimal way. Kevin apologizes for not taking photos of Anand pounding the pork with his new Thor’s hammer meat tenderizer. Apparently, it took a little persuading to keep Anand from pounding it until pulverized.

They were trying to recreate the meat in a sweet orange sauce that the kids get at school — the end result was tasty, though Kavi says the school version is notably sweeter. We liked this, though.

The broccoli part didn’t quite work, though — it soaked up too much sauce and got a little soggy with it. If we made this again, I think I’d just roast the broccoli separately and serve it on the side. And oh, we didn’t even make rice — that’s leftover rice reheated from a previous order of Thai food.

End result, though, we lit candles and sat down together and ate and it was good. We tried playing Two Truths and a Lie, which only sort of worked. Maybe we need more practice. 🙂

Sunday’s ice cream: chocolate with Nutella stirred in

Sunday’s ice cream was Anand’s choice — homemade chocolate with Nutella stirred in. Pretty good, though I used the chocolate ice cream recipe that came with the machine (just stirring cocoa into cold cream, essentially), and both Kev and I thought the end result was a little grainier than we would’ve liked. But it was fine, and the kids were delighted, so all was well. It’s almost gone now — even mediocre ice cream is still ice cream. 

I am feeling a desire to immerse myself in sweetness

Planning to run a little Valentine’s / Galentine’s Day flash sale tomorrow (Thursday) of sweets, hand-roasted Sri Lankan curry powder, and Feast of Serendib cookbooks on sale ($30 for hardcover, $15 for paperbacks, $10 off, such a deal!)

I am feeling a desire to immerse myself in sweetness.

If you’d like to be tagged into that, comment below — I’d be planning to mail out by Saturday, February 8th, so should reach throughout the U.S. before the 14th, no problem. I can only ship food within the U.S., sorry, but cookbooks will also be on sale, and happy to ship those anywhere, and also to sign and/or personalize!

Experimenting with decorative tops on Mas Paan

One reason I’m more of a recipe writer than a cook is that the experimenting is the most fun for me; this is what I was playing with on Thursday. I was curious whether I could do mas paan with a more decorative top than is typical. Answer — sort of kind of.

(The first two photos are mine — the four pretty ones that follow are inspiration images found online.)

Our standard curry filling is robust and moist enough that if you try to do the thing where you slice the buns on top to create a cross or star pattern, and actually slice through, it’ll have a very good chance of basically just bursting open at the cuts. Still tastes delicious, not so pretty. If you wanted that, I think you’d need to make more of a paste, like what I assume they used for the red bean filling buns (photo 3). So I wouldn’t recommend that.

If you’re very careful, you can slice just lightly enough to create a cross or star pattern of indentations, but that is a *lot* of finicky work for many little buns. Honestly, I would have to love you a whole lot to go to that much trouble, esp. since I’d expect some wastage along the way. (Some people are more skilled with delicate knife work than me, so they should feel free to go for it, though. The results are lovely, as in photo 4. Be sure to sprinkle seeds first, then slice, to get that effect.)

MAYBE I’d do scoring for a wedding or similar major occasion — I could make a triple batch, and plan to freeze the ones where I accidentally sliced through, and then eat those for my own snacks (happily) in months to come. But I wouldn’t really recommend the slicing approach either for our curry buns, unless you are quite persnickety. (If you watch the Great British Bake Show, you may remember the episodes where some contestants came to grief attempting their “artistically scored decorative loaves”…).

If you abandon scoring, though, you still have the option of sprinkling seeds. I don’t think that’s typical for mas paan in Sri Lanka — I googled, and only found one image with seeds sprinkled on top, and I don’t remember seeing it when visiting. But it works great.

After filling the bun, turning it over so the seam is on the bottom, and brushing with beaten egg (skip that last if allergic, but otherwise, it adds nice color and sheen to the bun), just sprinkle the seeds of your choice.

This was particular useful to me as I had three different kinds of buns, and I wanted to be sure I could tell them apart easily. (In Sri Lanka, fish buns are typically triangular, but I think most of the other buns I’ve seen are round?)

I ended up with:

– beef curry buns topped with black chia seeds
– spicy caramelized onion buns (seeni sambol) topped with sesame seeds
– jackfruit and chickpea curry topped with organic hemp seeds

The seeds add a lovely crunch element too, so unless I have someone seed-allergic at the table, I think I’ll be making all my curry buns topped with seeds from now on.

Rose bun photo added for inspiration — I may try that someday! And isn’t that last one, perfectly scored and seeded, just gorgeous? Mmm…