Recipe cards ordered

Recipe cards ordered — this is the final piece of the puzzle, and I’m sorry that it’s going to take one more week for them to get to me — they’ll be arriving on November 15th. Then we’ll swing into shipping on Nov 16 (and Stephanie is going to kill me that it’s one more week, because all the stacks in my dining room are making her stressed out), sorry! I suspect we’ll do one more packing party, just to get them out quickly. Feed people rice & curry, stuff envelopes. Good strategy.

Honestly, I probably need that week for roasting curry powder anyway, because we somehow totally miscounted, and I need to make something like twice as much curry powder as we thought. (It’s in 4 oz. bags, and somehow we missed that all the hardcovers come with 8 oz. of curry powder, which is good, lots of curries for people, but it’s going to take a little more time to roast and grind all that!)

But then we’ll be really, really done. Really. I swear. I won’t add any other items, no matter how many good ideas I have between now and then….

(How many times can I say ‘sorry for the delay’ and ‘thank you for your patience’ and ‘this has been a learning experience for me!’ to my Kickstarter backers? A lot. I can say it a lot.)

#serendibkitchen

Feast recipe cards

The Feast recipe cards are almost ready to order. I do hope people are okay with them being bigger than would fit in an actual recipe box — I realized that I’d promised to put recipe and image on the front, and room to address them and write a note on the back, so you could actually send them through the mail. If I’d done those 4×6 size, the recipes would be unreadably small, I think!
 
So they’re 6×9, and they’ll hopefully make fun postcards for Kickstarter recipients to mail to their friends, or even to frame. They are: ribbon tea sandwiches, eggplant sambol, hoppers / appam, chai, flood, and rosewater & pistachio marshmallows.
 
Huge thanks to Sophie Malik Hurst for saving my butt on getting these done and actually looking good — you wouldn’t want to see just how bad my version looked like. BAD. Must up my game on graphic design skills at some point, but in the interim, hooray for helpful folks. Check out her shop, The Biscuit Tin Studio, for truly adorable graphic design work!
 
#serendibkitchen

Sandalwood and rose — soaps and bath salts

Sandalwood done, rose done — soaps and bath salts. I don’t think I’m going to try bath bombs — I wasn’t really happy with how they came out last time, and I don’t want them falling apart on people as they open them.

I think a batch of jasmine, and maybe one of lime, and then the bath products will be done. I’m tempted to start experimenting with blends, which would also let me give them fun names, but will save that for another day.

One side benefit of soap-making — my kitchen is so clean. 

Cute little elephant soaps

Ongoing soap-making for the Kickstarter’s Island Relaxation packages. Almost done!

Look at the cute little elephants. An experiment. I die.

Kavi *begged* for one for her bathroom. She’s going to end up with a lot of soap, that girl.

Marshmallow-rocky road experiments!

I’ll have to make this again so I can write it up into a proper recipe, but here are the marshmallow-rocky road experiments. I made three different varieties; the clear favorite was the ruby chocolate with passionfruit marshmallows and dried mango. Mmmm….so good! I served these at the Feast packing party, and they were quickly devoured by my hardy volunteers.

Rocky road is so simple to make, and great to use up leftover bits of nuts and fruit and mango. Melt chocolate on half power in microwave, stirring every 30 seconds after the first minute, so as to not burn it. When it’s melted, stir in whatever bits you like; you can keep adding until it’s mostly bits with a thin coating of chocolate. Spread on a sheet of parchment paper, stick in the fridge and let it cool. Snap apart (this part is fun) or cut into squares (which is cool for showing the cross-sections), and serve.

I wish the new ruby chocolate was more widely available; right now, I mostly have to order the bags of chips online, though sometimes I can find a bar in a grocery store. I love its fruity tang; I think it might be my favorite chocolate now.

The other versions were good too, but in retrospect, I think the dark chocolate + cashew version would’ve been better with a sprinkling of flake salt over the top, and possibly a bit of cayenne mixed in. Ditto salt on the ruby chocolate and cashew, though I wouldn’t use the cayenne for that.

I could barely taste the dried coconut in one batch of ruby chocolate rocky road, so not sure it’s worth adding unless you use more / bigger pieces. Ditto the candied ginger in the dark chocolate actually, which surprised me — just need more, I think. MOAR GINGER.

#serendibkitchen
#blog
#experimenting

Mascot pre-order page is up!

Hey, here’s something exciting. Mascot has their pre-order page up for A Feast of Serendib! What does this mean? Well, they’ll fulfill orders as soon as they have books on hand, even though the official ‘launch’ date isn’t until March 6, when we’ll start doing a host of events around the country.

HOWEVER, they probably won’t have books in hand until end of December. So if you want books in time for the holidays, do still order them directly from my Serendib Kitchen site for the next few weeks.

ALSO, right now, you can only order paperbacks and ebooks from my site. (www.serendibkitchen.com). ALSO if you’d like curry powder with your book, OR if you’d like the print books signed or personalized (and Stephanie, we should make that an option on that order page — I don’t think it’s set up for that yet.)

But if you don’t mind an unsigned hardcover arriving in January-ish, feel free to order directly from Mascot:

https://mascotbooks.com/mascot-marketplace/buy-books/cookbooks/regional/a-feast-of-serendib/

They’ll take care of fulfillment on all of those, so as soon as we’re all switched over to them, I’ll be doing a lot less packing of things and a lot more writing. 

(I honestly don’t know off the top of my head whether I make more money on books I ship out myself or through Mascot, but both are absolutely fine.)

Woot! This is starting to feel more and more real.

A book, a book!

#serendibkitchen
#blog

Feast packing party!

Feast packing party! I highly recommend feeding your friends and having them help pack if you are trying to indie publish your first book. Like a barn raising!

It was such a big pile of books and sheets of paper, and I hadn’t even finished grinding the hand-roasted spices for the curry powder packets. I would’ve been quite discouraged, facing that alone. Luckily, Paul and Craig were perfectly willing to grind spices and fill bags. Teri, a former bookseller, even brought her packing tape gun!

PaulTeriAlli, Karen (and her kids!), StephanieEulàlia, and and Craig all came by to help — we certainly didn’t finish packing that night, but we made very good progress. And may I recommend a big pot of rice as the base for your packing? Rice will sustain you! I made a vegetarian pilaf with a mix of red and basmati rice, and a nice chicken biryani. Mmm…

Even just sorting out all the packing sheets was a big task, because due to our inexperience (I think), we didn’t manage to get BackerKit to sort it all out properly for us. So there was much shuffling of papers and many questions about who exactly was getting WHICH postcards.

Honestly, I’m sure we’ve added hours and hours to the task of just packing up the books, this first time through. Thank all the little gods for friends, and their willingness to take salmon curry and pol sambol in exchange for labor!

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have had quite so many different reward tiers and BackerKit items — they added exponentially to the complexity of it all. Stephanie estimated that there were at least 30 different unique sets that people could order, and SKUs are more complicated than you’d think.

If I ever indie publish another book (I do love the putting-the-book-together part, if not the business side — I think I could use a business partner should that happen), at least we’ll have learned from our mistakes along the way here!

With the ‘help’ of a #spacecat, we worked steadily for hours, from 6-9 on Wednesday night. It didn’t FEEL like the stacks of books were getting any smaller, but some eggplant curry and Roshani‘s lentils kept us going.

She’d brought over a huge batch for an earlier lunch with a visiting writer, and I’d frozen the extra, so was able to serve them for this. SO helpful. One fabulous aspect to our food is that so much of it freezes beautifully.

If you need to feed vegetarians Sri Lankan food, I’d particularly recommend eggplant curry + lentils; you get that rich curry flavor and luscious mouthfeel with the eggplant & the substantial protein of the lentils. Also excellent for non-vegetarians. 

That looks like good progress, doesn’t it? It does! Look at all those neat rows. I think we’ll be ready to actually start taking packages to the post office by….I want to say Thursday of this week? If not, definitely next Tuesday (11/12).

And Jed has just finished the ePub (yesterday!), and ALMOST finished the Kindle formatting, so those lovely electronic editions will be flying through the electrons towards Kickstarter backers momentarily.

Print books would go out sooner, but World Fantasy in L.A. and Scott Woods‘s Parallels writing conference in Columbus next weekend are intervening. I can’t pack if I’m not actually physically there! But 11/12 shipping out should still get A Feast of Serendib to Kickstarter backers and other pre-orders everywhere in the U.S., at least, in good time for holiday gifts.

The current plan is that you can still order copies of books and packets of curry powder from me on the Serendib Kitchen website directly, through the end of November. #Spacecat Aryabhata says, “You need a Sri Lankan cookbook! And your friend / relative / co-worker does too!”

That’ll be it, though; I need to take a break and ‘go dark’ for a while after that, to recover and write a novel. I may even turn off FB for a week or two. (What? Will I be able to breathe without FB? We’ll see.)

Then back for the official launch in March.  Thankfully, THAT distribution will be handled by Mascot Books (though I’ll still be able to send out signed & personalized copies directly.

My packing friends loved this dessert experiment, by the way — I took the leftover bits of marshmallows and made…umm…not sure what to call it actually. Marshmallow brittle? Tropical rocky road? Something like that! Details and more photos of that coming soon.

Elotes in L.A.

I haven’t had the chance to eat a lot of interesting food on this L.A. trip — mostly serviceable hotel food. But was amused to see this take on elotes (Mexican street corn) — with Hot Cheetos! I haven’t had that before, and it was fun. Anand loves both corn and Cheetos, so I’ll have to try to make this for him.

Though I have to say, this dish was dry enough that I had them bring me some extra sour cream to accompany it. Charred corn = great. Dry corn = bad. I love elotes (one of my favorite foods to eat on a Chicago beach at the end of summer, along with a huge cup of ripe mango with chili, salt and lime), but elotes are supposed to be slathered with something creamy, people. I’m not a Mexican food expert, but I’m going to stand by this claim. Fight me.

Along with the classic cotija cheese, you can use Mexican Crema (ideally), mayo and butter, or sour cream. Just don’t serve elotes to me dry!