(no subject)

[coraa]

I just cooked my second dish out of Mary Anne Mohanraj's A Taste of Serendib, a Sri Lankan cookbook. The first was spicy chicken curry, which was very good indeed; this time I made a carrot and green bean curry (except, given the time of year, I swapped in lengths of asparagus for green beans). (I suppose technically it's the third dish, since I also made a sweet onion sambol.)

I knew basically nothing about Sri Lankan cooking before picking up the cookbook, and I'm enjoying it very much. The first thing I notice is the onions: these recipes use a lot of onions. I cook with onions quite frequently and even so I looked at the giant pile of chopped onions each of those dishes asked for with some trepidation. But they cook down and cook down, until the softened onions (golden and translucent and just slightly sweet, but not brown) become the main component of the sauce. And since the spices get cooked with the onions, as the spices release their flavors those flavors mingle with the juices of the onions and develop a lot of complexity.

Anyway. Delicious! I will definitely be cooking more from this book—perhaps the spicy beef and potato curry next.

Comments

[cyanocitta]

Oh, cool, I'm glad to hear the recipes are good. I picked that one up, too, and was much amused by her comment at the beginning about buying enough onions.

[coraa]

All the things I've tried so far have been very good!

And yeah. I thought I was prepared, because I'm used to chopping an onion or two to start when I'm cooking, but the huge pile that three chopped medium onions made on my chopping board did give me pause! But they cooked down beautifully.

Herbs from auction

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

I've been trying to contact you through LJ about the box of herbs from the liver auction, but maybe the LJ messages haven't been getting through since you're on Dreamwidth. Anyhow, you won this auction!

http://community.livejournal.com/debsliverlovers/23648.html

Let me know when you've paid and I can ship them to you. Send me an email through LJ or let me know how to email you.

Re: Herbs from auction

[coraa]

Oh, crud! I do still use LJ, but I never got that message. I'm terribly sorry. I'm at cora dot anderson at gmail dot com, and I'll make the donation promptly tonight.

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

*chuckle* I forgot the different levels of spicy to Mary Ann's writing.