Food and Recipes

My kitchen smells gorgeously of passionfruit. It’s Pooja Makhijani‘s fault — I was going to go to sleep, but I finished her online food writing class (first session), and just had to cook something. So, experimenting with passionfruit-vanilla marshmallows it is. I kind of want to try to make three different kinds of passionfruit marshmallows […]

(30 minutes, serves 4) Sweet milk rice: 1 c. short-grain white rice 2 c. water 1 T sugar pinch of salt 1 1/2 c. sweetened coconut milk Chili-Salt-Lime Mango 2 c. chopped mangoes 1/2 t. fine salt 1/2 t. chili powder (cayenne) 1 t. lime juice 4 t. jaggery, grated (or brown sugar) 1. Cook

I wonder if Kevin realized, back when we first started dating more than twenty-five years ago that he would, several times a year, be drafted into being support staff for massive cooking efforts. I cooked for pretty close to three days straight for this party (with a 6 hour break on Friday for teaching) —

(makes about 45 tea cakes)   Dry ingredients: 1.5 c. all-purpose flour 2 t. baking powder 1/2 t. baking soda 1/4 t. salt 1/4 t. cardamom   Wet ingredients: 1.5 c. mango puree 1/3 cup oil 1/2 c. white sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract pinch saffron threads   1. Pre-heat the oven to 350F, and

2 1/2 tablespoons (1 Knox packet) unflavored gelatin 1 1/2 cups sugar 1 cup light corn syrup 1 cup water (divided use) 1/4 teaspoon salt 2/3 c. mango puree 1/3 c. lime juice 8 oz. Cool Whip 1 cup chopped pineapple orange food coloring (optional) 1. Place ½ c. of cold water in the bowl

Morning mango-lime marshmallow experiment (will adding more gelatin make them set? Who knows! Tune back this evening for the answer…) and finishing up my grading. Good combination. (Thanks to Kat for the emergency infusion of light corn syrup when I ran out…sometimes a girl just has to make marshmallows.)

These fancy bowl things have long names. Another yummy experiment, and only about 30 minutes to make (assuming you pre-marinated the chicken in a tandoori-spiced yogurt earlier in the day). Pre-heat your grill pan, then start the chopped mushrooms sautéing in a separate pan in butter, masala powder, salt and lime juice. Five minutes in,

I’ve been experimenting with alternatives to white rice, and alternatives to the traditional Sri Lankan way of eating rice, which is a big plate of rice with a little curry on top. That’s reasonably frugal, but also pretty high in starch and low in fiber (things I pay attention to as I get older and

I’ll be making Sri Lankan marshmallows with Kavya this week, and sending them out as part of a spring book sale. Will run it for just the first week of April, so if this sounds appealing, get your orders in quick! Spring Books Into Flowers Sale! In spring, a person’s thoughts turn to dreams of

Putting my dad to work — he kindly went through the TOC of the new Sri Lankan cookbook and corrected all my transliterations. I got a *few* right… In my defense, the issue is that there are gazillion ways to transliterate Tamil words, and if you just google, you’ll get a lot of variations. Especially