Food and Recipes

I have finished my edits on Feast, and am sending the cookbook to my indexer and layout person. No more changes, Mary Anne. I mean it. If you decide you need to add another hundred recipes, please wait another decade or two. Still planning to bring out more little cookbooks — Instant Pot Sri Lankan, […]

    I’ve been wanting to learn how to cook different kinds of fish, so tonight, I took on halibut. This seems like a fairly delicate fish, and many of the recipes I reviewed were very simple and lightly seasoned. Which is fine, but, y’know, Sri Lankans gotta bring a little heat, right? So I took

(30-90 minutes, serves 6-8) The timing on this is so variable because you can either do it the long way described below, the way my mother recommends, which is definitely a bit tastier — or you can do a much faster version, where you mix the spices with the chicken, skip the marinating, and then

   (10 minutes, serves 4) You know how you’re tired and the kids need dinner, so you pick up a rotisserie chicken on the way home from work? And your family eats some of it that night, and maybe a bit more the next day, but they’re bored with it after that. But you can’t stand

(1 hr, serves 8) Cooking lamb curry in the instant pot is only a little faster than cooking this on the stovetop, but does mean that you can make it in advance, or go run an errand (or attend a board meeting, in my case), and let it keep warm until you’re ready to devour

   (1 hour, serves 6-8) Cooking this in the Instant Pot only saves about 30 minutes off the traditional recipe, but it does make it easy to set it going, and then wander off, knowing it’ll be kept nice and warm for you until you get back. When I made this test batch, I was

   Instant Pot Sri Lankan Beef Smoore   This dish translated really easily to the Instant Pot — I hardly had to modify it at all. And it’s simple enough that even a novice cook shouldn’t find it too intimidating. It normally takes 4-6 hours by the traditional method, but this was just an hour, start

  Okay, so this was my first instant pot experiment, and I definitely went wrong in a few ways. For one, red lentils are delicate and don’t actually take that long to cook, so it doesn’t really make sense to make them in a pressure cooker — the stovetop works fine. All the lentil recipes I

It’s going to take me a while to figure out what the Instant Pot is actually good for. For example, this chicken and potato curry isn’t really any faster doing it this way than on the stovetop — you need the same time sautéing, then the time for preheating and pressure cooking, then you need

Doesn’t this look yummy? It’s a Sri Lankan veggie poriyal, but it is mostly using up leftovers! (I hate waste.) 1. Take pea pods and carrots leftover from the previous night’s party dip, where they’d been served with hummus. Chop up. 2. Take the kids’ leftover steamed broccoli, dull and unappealing. Chop up. 3. Chop