It turns out that when you’re used to making a roast leg of lamb for Christmas dinner and you’re generally serving 6-10 people, but this year you only have two adults and two kids who don’t actually eat masses of lamb on the regular, then you might end up in our situation. Three days after Christmas, we still had a solid three pounds of roast lamb in the fridge, and I had actually had my fill of sliced roast lamb with mint sauce and stuffing, roast lamb sandwiches, etc.
Luckily, it is easy to transform leftover roast meat into a delectable Sri Lankan curry. I don’t have a precise recipe for you here, but basic procedure:
– chop three onions
– chop plenty of garlic (I think I did half a head)
– cube the meat (fairly big cubes are fine)
– sauté onions and garlic in oil with 1 t. each mustard seed and cumin seed, cinnamon stick, 3-5 cardamom pods, 3-5 cloves; if you have curry leaves on hand, toss those in too
– add 1-2 T cayenne (to your taste)
– add 1 heaping t. Sri Lankan curry powder
– add 1 – 1.5 t. salt
– add 1 t. tamarind paste (the liquidy paste in the Tamicon jar — if you’re using a different kind, you may need a different amount)
– add a few T ketchup or 1/2 can tomato puree
– add 1 can coconut milk (I like Chaokoh)
You should now have a delicious sauce. The meat is already cooked (hopefully on the rarer side for best results), so just add it now, bring it to a boil, then turn the heat down to a simmer and simmer it for 10-20 minutes, covered, just to let the flavors blend.
Have finished lamb curry with bread or rice. If there’s STILL more than you need, it will freeze beautifully this way, to pull out a month or two from now when the thought of roast lamb is a distant, fragrant memory.
Alternatively, you can now take your lamb curry, and use it to make either a lamb biryani or lamb kottu roti, which would make for a pretty fabulous New Year’s feast dish, letting you take that 3 lbs. of lamb and make enough food to feed a dozen people. We don’t have a dozen people around our place at the moment, but next year…
I call this composition, “Mommy is very tired, so here is a table full of food for you to graze on, please don’t ask me for anything else for at least a week, thank you.”
This was another Hello Fresh thingie that I had for lunch — prosciutto and cheese sandwich on ciabatta with fig jam, arugula, and balsamic. It was pretty yummy, but the teeny tiny bottle of balsamic feels wasteful, and I do usually keep a jar of fig jam on hand. (Though we happen to be out right now, must buy more.) Still, a fancier sandwich that I would probably think to make on my own for lunch, so that was nice. And it reminded me to get more jam, and more prosciutto…
So, we tried signing up for Hello, Fresh, one of those meal kit places. The idea being that it would make it easier to teach the kids how to cook, since all the components would come together and we could skip the menu planning, grocery shopping, gathering ingredient phases.
I think that part basically does work, but I have a pretty mixed review of our first dish. The idea was that it would be roasted tomatoes and garlic with spaghetti and pan-seared chicken breast in a creamy sauce . The end result was quite pretty. Kavi (age 13) was able to do most of the steps, and Anand (age 10) helped a bit too. BUT.
a) the components would have been noticeably cheaper (maybe half the price?) if we’d bought them ourselves (and, in fact, we had almost all of them on hand already) — I mean, I knew that going in, and it’s okay, given the ‘easier for learning’ aspect, but wanted to note in case that wasn’t clear to anyone
b) they had us pan sear chicken breast for 5-7 minutes on each side, and even doing it for just 5 minutes each, the chicken did end up rather dry, as you might expect — it’s just not a great way to prepare chicken breast. I would definitely have used thighs instead, but Americans have this thing about chicken breast, which I guess is why they used it, but if you’re going to use breast, then you want to do something to keep it moister — brine it, maybe, or poach it and then give it a quick sear. Something.
c) for the sauce, they had us melt butter in a pan, and then add four little tubes of cream cheese and the pasta water. It felt somewhat wasteful having all those little separate tubes of cream cheese, and also, the resulting sauce still mostly tasted like cream cheese, instead of like a cream sauce, which I think is what they were trying to approximate. It was…OKAY, I guess, in terms of being slightly simpler than teaching Kavi how to make a roux and a cream sauce, but not that much simpler, and really kind of felt like it was mostly a way of advertising Philly cream cheese.
d) finally, the big complaint, is that they had us take two cloves of garlic (I don’t even want to know what they charged for the two cloves of garlic, but anyway), wrap them in foil, and roast them with the tomatoes for 20-25 minutes. I was pretty dubious about that method, and when we took it out and tried to crush it (which Kavi was really excited to do), she found, unsurprisingly, that the garlic was completely overcooked and pretty burnt. It was uncrushable, and we couldn’t use it. We added some garlic powder to the pan sauce instead, which was okay. We’re going to show Kavi how to properly roast garlic sometime soon, because actual roast garlic is a thing of great beauty.
So…I mean, I’m not cancelling this. We have burgers coming up later in the week, and next week’s meals ordered, and I think we’ll do it for a little while at least. It did get all four of us cooking together, which we haven’t done in a while, with everything being so harried, so it might be worth it just for that. I think it’s a good way in for beginner cooks, or even intermediate cooks who want to be pushed to try new things.
And it is nice, even for me, to have some of the decision-making taken out of weekly meal prep.
But I think going forward, we’re also going to feel free to critique their recipes and amend them as we feel necessary.
The last of the December treat boxes have gone out, at the top Interstellar level, and I have to say, it’s pretty impressive how much I can jam into a large Priority Mail box. Chock-full! I couldn’t fit it all into one photo — there’s a sweets layer, and a bath layer, and a textiles (infinity scarves, tea towels) & stationery (greeting cards) layer. I hope the recipients are delighted. The next boxes go out in March — theme: Unicorn Garden.
I’m limiting the number of these I offer, because I want to be sure not to exceed my capacity, so there’s only 2 subscriptions left at this level currently.. Reminder that if you sign up at any of my Patreon levels for a year (what a great gift!), you get 4 quarterly shipments sent to you, AND 10% off for the annual subscription.
And kitty-dragons! I’m not sure if they’re meant to be kitty-dragons or baby dragons, but they look like kitty-dragons to me, so we’ll go with that.
I was going to put a little blood orange extract in the icing, for a bit of extra dragon excitement, but I forgot, oh well. But they’re still nummy, with a light lemon flavor, and so ridiculously pretty.
Dark chocolate-dipped passionfruit marshmallows, sprinkled with silver stars and pink hearts. I do a lot of experimenting with food, and a lot of the joy for me is coming up with new combinations, but sometimes, something just works so well, you know you’re not going to mess with it anymore.
These are becoming a staple, along with the dragonfruit chocolate (Kavi’s favorite chocolate!), Sri Lankan cashew milk toffee, and love cake. One thing we’re planning to explore in 2021 is whether we can expand the Serendib Kitchen sweet-making a little bit. I don’t have the time to cook any more than I already do (and honestly, I should probably be cooking a little less, and writing more).
So that would mean me teaching someone else how to make these, taste-testing to make sure they have it down, and then having them produce them. If we can figure it all out, then maybe we’ll even be able to supply some for local stores (which will require getting a different license, etc. and so on).
Of course, that’ll require researching aspects such as which items are shelf stable (the dragonfruit chocolate and the milk toffee, I think), which need to stay refrigerated (the marshmallows are okay sitting out for a day or two, but if they don’t sell quickly, better to refrigerate them for freshness, and love cake should be frozen or at least refrigerated if you’re going to keep it for any length of time), etc. We’ll see!
It’d be lovely to offer, alongside the cookbooks, going forward.
As I finish up the holiday gifting, I got to put together some gift packages for my staff too. Some version of this will be going out to the Serendib House crew: Stephanie Bailey, Emmanuel Henderson, Darius Vinesar, Cara Bogehegn.
I couldn’t do a quarter of what I do without their help, so thank you to everyone who’s ordered from us this year, and helped me keep employing them, even during a pandemic. They alleviate a lot of stress for me in a variety of ways, and multiply my efforts enormously.
(We really need to take a staff photo sometime, folks!)
I haven’t quite figured out the shipping yet for sending jars of curry powder (it’s a little complicated, because it involves figuring out what size UPS Priority mail boxes fit which jars, how much padding I need for shipping glass safely in padded envelopes, etc.), but at least for locals, I have jars of curry powder available now, in three sizes:
– 1/4 c. hex
– 1/2 c. tall
– 1/2 c. hex
You definitely get more curry powder for your money if you get it in a bag, but the jars are much more convenient for sitting in your spice rack, so it’s a tradeoff!
I’ll be asking Stephanie Bailey to add these to our Shopify site in the next day or two, so any locals looking for last minute gifts they can pick-up from my porch, consider a cookbook + jar of homemade curry powder. You can add on a tea towel or two as well, to make a lovely package.
