



with Mary Anne Mohanraj
Dinner with writer friends. I don’t think Roshani and I have ever really cooked a full meal together before — it went surprisingly well. 🙂
Did a little writing work today, in between family commitments. This was fulfilling commitments too — way back when, I did the Vegan Serendib kickstarter, and I promised a Serendib tea party sampler cookbook. I’m finally working on that. It’s a blend of Sri Lankan and traditional British afternoon tea, which is what I usually do for my tea parties.
This isn’t final — a few of these are completely theoretical recipes, and I’m going to have to actually make them and make sure they’re delicious before I list them. And I think I want to include a non-tea beverage for each season as well. But it’s going to look something like this. 🙂
We’ll have a pre-order page up soon for the ebook (and of course, if you backed the Kickstarter, you shouldn’t buy another copy!). If you’re interested in being tagged into the pre-order page, comment below. It’ll be $1.99, I think, just like the cocktail party sampler book.
At some point, I’d love to expand this into a proper full cookbook, with about three times as many recipes — the plan would be to do it month by month, rather than season by season. Which should get us close to 120 recipes total, I think.
But one step at a time. We put this together, and then I can set up the Kickstarter for Gluten-Free Serendib, which is the next cookbook I promised to work on. I’m expecting that to go pretty fast, because most of the recipes in Feast and Vegan are already gluten-free — I just need to work on a few of them (and decide whether to use Feast or Vegan as the base — hmm…)
Anyway, nice to be making some progress after too long not writing anything.
Lilac & lime simple syrup. Delicate sweet + citrus floral flavor, nice with gin and tonic (got to keep that malaria away), would also be nice with seltzer water. I’ll have 9 little bottles at the art fair Saturday.
I meant to make this earlier — by the time I got around to it, most of my purple lilac petals had fallen, so I ended up with mostly pink petals, which made a sort of brown syrup.
Usually, if you add citrus to lilac syrup, it’ll turn purple, but I think the pink is just not strong enough color for that, so I ended up with a sort of melon-y color? Still pretty, though it doesn’t particularly shout ‘lilac’ when you look at it. 🙂
Some recipes recommend adding a few blueberries to get a purple color — I didn’t have any on hand, but maybe I’ll try that next year. This recipe suggests that, for example: https://www.havocinthekitchen.com/lilac-syrup/
They also suggest uses: “Think of fancy cocktails, refreshing lemonades, or over your ice cream. Enjoy with pancakes, crepes, and French toasts. Besides, it would be great as a part of desserts, soak cake, topping for your oatmeal, and a dressing for your fruit salads.”
Like most everyone lately, we’ve been a little startled by how grocery prices have gone up.
Cabbage is still pretty cheap, though! This is cabbage varai — delicious and healthy, just the thing to round out a plate of rice and curry.
And did I mention that it’s both easy and fast? 🙂
Sweet, firm, rich with coconut.
8 oz. cabbage 1 medium onion, minced 2 fresh green chilies, seeded and chopped ¼ rounded tsp. ground turmeric ¼ rounded tsp. freshly ground black pepper 1 rounded tsp. salt ½ cup shredded unsweetened coconut
(This recipe and many more can be found in my cookbooks, A Feast of Serendib and Vegan Serendib.)