Exam season has ended and thesis draft 3 is currently being decimated by my supervisor so, for a rather lovely change this weekend, I had a day off! I think the last time this happened must have been August 2006 (yes, I even taught over Christmas and Easter). Unfortunately, my first days off clashed with one of Goon’s working weekends. This time he was attending Yahoo’s first European Hack Day.

No, I don’t see the appeal either. The good news was that I got a chance to visit my parents properly for a change and spend some time poking around our family home. I’m quite wary of doing this since our house tends to be a bit of a breeding ground for spiders. I’ve never understood the affinity they had for the dark spot under the stairs.

I did find some interesting things. A book of my old poetry for a start, a load of old music  I used to play and some stolen recipe books too. As you might expect, I also raided the cupboards. My parents frequently shop at Sri-Lankan grocery stores so there’s a rather interesting selection of tinned fruit and vegetables. This time, I took some jackfruit because Goon hadn’t tried it before. I also got my hands on what is possibly the best thing about Sri-Lankan cuisine.

These are string hoppers. A Sri-Lankan staple made from  rice flour dough. The dough is made from just rice flour, water and seasonings  but apparently you need to sift the flour several times and get the mixture just right or the hoppers fall apart or turn sticky.

Once you have your dough, a special hand press with tiny holes is used to press the dough into fine noodles. The raw noodles are allowed to fall onto a holder so they form little round, thin ‘cakes.’  These are then steamed until they are cooked and then eaten with  curries and coconut sambal. As with most carbs, they don’t have a very strong flavour of their own, but they have a marvellous texture. Not chewy, but soft and slightly springy. 

I have been forbidden from trying to make these myself. Apparently it is far too difficult and my parents have hidden the equipment from me . These hoppers were bought from a caterer’s shop and are particularly good. I took home enough to feed me and Goon with plenty left over.

When I got back to my flat I made some curries to accompany our hoppers. Firstly, a beef curry with coconut milk and Sri Lankan spicing. It’s not at all traditional to use beef since Sri Lankan Buddhists have some Hindu influences on their culture. Mutton and chicken are usually used, but I quite like curried braising steak.  I also whipped up some dahl with garlic, mild spices and black pepper. We had the jackfruit too, which was flavoured with tamarind.

I dived in, eating in the Sri Lankan way with just my hands. Well, just one hand actually. Like in many other cultures, using your left hand is a no-no. I find eating this way lots of fun. You use the hoppers to grab bits of meat and scoop up the vegetables. Goon looked a little intimidated by this method of eating. Then he went and got himself a knife and fork. I don’t think I’ve ever seen hoppers being neatly cut up before. It was a rather strange and funny sight for me. It’s a bit like watching someone eating fish-fingers with chopsticks!

Then again, a fork is useful for getting the curry soaked hopper pieces from the bottom of the plate.

I love this bit of the meal.

Goon really liked the hoppers and was intrigued by the jack fruit. I’d say it is an acquired taste, but I like it, especially in a sour-tangy curry sauce.

So, if you happen to live near a Sri-Lankan store, see if they make and sell string hoppers because I don’t think they’re found in any other cuisine and you’re missing out if you haven’t tried them. They’re definitely my favourite bit of Sri Lankan cuisine.

Last Sunday, over lunch, I was telling Goon about how I wanted to enter WTSIM no 5 (which Cooksister Jeanne is hosting) but was totally stuck on ideas. The theme this time was stuffed vegetables and fruits.  Goon had a suggestion.

GOON: I know what you can stuff. I’ve seen green wrinkly things. The label said you can stuff them.
ME: Any idea what they are?
GOON: Green wrinkly things.
ME: But what are they called?
GOON: I don’t know. But they’re green and wrinkly.

I was clearly going to get no more information about the mystery vegetable from him and I mentally dismissed the green wrinkly things as some figment of Goon’s imagination. But, that evening, six of them appeared in the kitchen.

I recognised them immediately, although I think I’d describe them as more knobbly than wrinkly. Goon had picked up kerala, which had appeared in my mother’s kitchen from time to time when I was little. It’s a vegetable which, like courgettes and sprouts, drives fear into the hearts of small children.

Here the vegetable is known as bitter gourd. It’s called that for a good reason. In order to remind myself what the kerala tasted like, I cut a tiny sliver from the middle of the largest one and tasted.

For a second I thought it wasn’t so bad but, literally a few seconds later, there seemed to be a small chemical war going on in my mouth.  My face contorted and I made a noise that was something like “GAAAAAAAH!” The next ten minutes were spent trying desperately to drown out the flavour with cherry brandy. It didn’t go easily. *

I was seriously dubious about trying anything with the green knobbly gourd but, since Goon had gone to all the effort of getting it, I thought I’d better make an attempt at cooking it. Some people actively like it, so there must be something I could do to de-bitter my kerala.

I called up my parents to see if they could help me make this strange vegetable edible. Apparently they’d only ever used them in salads and curries, which didn’t really help me with my plans for stuffing, but cooking with sugar and tamarind seemed to be a common theme. The internet also provided me with some help. The bitterness of the kerala could be reduced by scraping off some skin, deseeding it, rubbing it with salt and soaking in cold water. I decided to try and balance the bitter flavour with a very strong sweet and sour stuffing made from tomato, onion,  and lots of sugar and tamarind. After all, it works for chicory. The dish would be an accompaniment to  a Sri-Lankan style goat curry.

I didn’t really know what to expect from my kerala as I began to prepare them, but scraping off the skin was easy enough. It did however leave a big green mess in the kitchen.

Once the skin was off, I cut the kerala in half and looked inside. Like many gourds, it had  a clear divide between the flesh and seed area.

A small knife was ideal to scrape out the seeds. Now there was a cylindrical hole in the gourd which was a perfect shape and size for stuffing. 

So the gourds were salted and soaked for an hour whilst I finished preparing the rest of our dinner: the slow cooked goat curry and spiced rice. I also made a lot of dahl, just in case the gourd was inedible.

The tomato chutney stuffing for the gourd was simple to make. I sweated some onion, added a couple of fresh chopped tomatoes, tomato puree and coriander, then added lots of sugar, tamarind and just a drop or two of vinegar to make it really sweet and tangy. Once the gourds were stuffed I cooked them in the excess tomato concoction.

Now, maybe Goon accidentally found the bitterest bitter gourds in the shop, but even after lots of soaking, these things were still not very nice. Goon ate one piece and said “Why the heck would anyone voluntarily eat these things?” I have to admit, I was thinking the same thing. The sweet and sour flavour certainly helped but, after a few bites, the bitterness was overwhelming. I can’t believe that some people actually eat it without salting it first!

So, if you happen to be a bitter gourd fan, good for you. I don’t get it but I think the sweet-sour thing turned it from totally inedible to the point where I could manage a piece or two. Fortunately there was plenty of curry so we didn’t go hungry.

This is my entry to this month’s Waiter, Waiter event. The roundup will be on Jeanne’s blog very soon, so go and check out the other entries. I’m sure that, unlike me, most people even made something they could eat!

* Which meant I had to drink a lot of cherry brandy. Shame.

It’s been a funny old week. I thought that since half my students were going on holiday I’d have loads of free time. But it seems the few remaining ones had other ideas. Ideas involving three hours of tutorials a day. Each. I have been starting teaching at 9am and finishing at around 9pm, with a few hours in between to hurriedly type thesis. 

In the midst of all this I got a call from these guys at Market Kitchen. Apparently I will be on the telly soon. More on that when I know what exactly is going on.

To add to the already huge stress levels, Goon has been away this week, working in Newcastle for his web-hosting company, Byethost. I thought this would mean that cooking for me this week would be reduced to quick and fairly boring meals as there was no way I could cope with arriving home at 10pm, getting up at 8am, cooking properly and cleaning up the kitchen.

It seems however that I was wrong. The basic meals took on a life of their own. For the first night, I had a fresh tuna steak. I thought this was perfect for my situation. It would be quick to cook and still really tasty. My plan was to just sear it and have it with new potatoes and a salad to give myself time to sleep that night, but then an idea struck me.

My dad had brought me some gotu-kola leaves the previous weekend. I guess this is a bit of an obscure plant. It goes by a variety of names, including, Antanan, Brahmi and, over here, we have a close relative of it called pennywort. The leaf is important in Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine and, in Sri Lanka, the leaf is used in salads and also blended with coconut to make a breakfast drink.

I hadn’t eaten these leaves since my childhood and, when I tried them from the box in the fridge, I remembered why. They are a bit of an acquired taste, at least on their own. Adding a little bit of dessicated coconut and lime, however, gives the leaves a new lease of life. The sweetness of coconut balances the leaves’ bitterness and the lime gives it a pleasant freshness. This flavour combination was the basis of the spontaneous idea I had to jazz up my dinner.

I scored  my tuna steak and left it to marinate briefly in a blend of chilli oil, grated ginger, garlic and grated lime zest. 

The gotu-kola leaves went in the blender. I blitzed them, adding coconut milk slowly until I had a pesto like consisitency. I also blended in a couple of teaspoons of grated coconut, some lime zest and a little fresh red chilli. The result was very interesting, in a good way. The bitterness of the leaves had gone but the distinctive ‘medicinal’ taste was still there. I tried to find some rice noodles in my cupboard, failed and settled for spaghetti instead and tossed the cooked stands in my makeshift pesto.

Centalla Asiatica (gotu-kola). Picture from Wikipedia

The balance of flavour here was really good. There was the classic gotu-kola, coconut, lime combination balanced by the ginger and chilli in the tuna. I think more ginger was needed somwhere but, other than that, I couldn’t complain about this dish. I also made a quick tomato and aubergine side dish with coriander, which, again, because if its sweetness, completmented the gotu-kola flavour really well.

This was a suprising success for such a random idea. I think I’ll work on it because there’s  potential for an interesting and tasty Sri-Lankan- British fusion dish. 

Also, since it contains a weird and relatively unheard of plant, it is perfect for Kalyn’s  Weekend Herb Blogging which, this week is hosted by  Anh from Food Lover’s Journey. I found an interesting fact about the leaf as I researched it for this post. Apparently in ancient times it was regarded as a natural version of viagra. A story tells of a Sri Lankan king, Aruna, mustering the energy to satisfy his harem of fifty on the powers of the gotu-kola leaf.     

More believably, the leaf also promotes the healing of wounds by speeding up the scarring process and is an anti-oxidant.

I often wonder  what it is that makes a certain cuisine popular across the world. For example, why has Chinese food taken off in almost every country whereas say, Carribean cuisine, which in my opinion just as good or maybe even better, only seen in a few places where there are large communities of immigrants? 

Sri Lankan cuisine is like this too. Who here has heard of string hoppers, kothu roti or lunu miris? Not many of you I imagine. Despite the cosmopolitan nature of modern Britain, the cuisine has remained almost completely unknown. I wonder what has made it this way. It can’t be the use of chilli and spice.  Maybe it’s the way they (by our standards) overcook some things or the fact that dark brown sauces aren’t all that attractive? 

Perhaps that is a question for the people with proper culinary training. What I really want to talk about is ambul thiyal. This is a very popular dish of a fish steak (usually an oily fish like kingfish) in a sour curry sauce. Sri Lanka has a great selection of delicious fish. However on the rare occasions I’m there, eating the curried fish makes me cringe. It’s  frequently over-salted and overcooked, sometimes it is also overspiced. Living in London, a place where this beautiful oily fish is so expensive to buy, I hate seeing it put to waste.

In spite of this  I DO like the flavours in Sri Lankan curries and for a while I’ve had a craving for ambul thiyal.  I was wondering if there was any way I could take this traditional dish and alter it to really take advantage of it’s main ingredient and make it more acceptable to a British palate like mine.

I had two juicy swordfish steaks from Borough that would be perfect for this experiment. Many recipes for ambul thiyal suggest using tuna. I disagree. I think the sourness of the sauce wouldn’t really complement the flavour of the tuna (although, since tuna loses some of it’s flavour when overcooked, it is fine for the dish after about ten minutes in the pan). Swordfish or marlin, which work so well with a tangy hollandaise,  would be much better choices.

Traditional recipes call for pieces of fish to be boiled with a  variety of spices (including cinnamon, fennel seed and curry leaves) in water, tamarind and vinegar until you have a thick gravy and very well done fish. I say bugger that. Especially since my swordfish had set me back £10 for half a kilo. My plan was to marinate the fish well, make the curry sauce separately and then pan fry until it was just pink in the center and moist and juicy all the way through.

Into my fish marinade went 1 large clove of crushed garlic, a tablespoon of  grated ginger, a little grated lemon zest, a teaspoon of ground fennel and  half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon all mixed together with enough chilli oil to coat the fish. I scored the fish all over then coated it with the marinade and left it for about 90 minutes, turning it every fifteen minutes or so.

The sauce was made by frying a small minced onion gently in vegetable oil with a couple of chopped birds eye chillies, fennel seed, crushed black peppercorns, a cinnamon stick, thin slices of lemon zest, curry leaves, ginger and crushed garlic. When the onion was soft I added 500ml of fish stock and let it boil. When it had reduced by half, I tasted it and decided it needed something. I added some ground coriander and ground fennel. When most of the liquid had boiled away, I took half a tablespoon of tamarind paste and mixed it with water and added that to the curry. Then I added white wine vinegar a little at a time until I was happy with the flavour. I let the mixture reduce to a thick gravy, tasted again, and added more pepper.

At this point I took the sauce off the heat and cooked my swordfish steaks on a high heat for two minutes a side. Finally I poured the sauce over the fish and let it sit at room temperature until I finished off my kiribath accompaniment and some green beans with dahl.

Well, I don’t know what my Dad would say to this. Probably something like “this fish is raw,” which it wasn’t. Unfortunately Dad doesn’t know there’s an intermediate stage between raw and charcoal. I bet Mum would have liked it though. 

The ambul thiyal gravy certainly tasted very similar to the authentic version. I think my addition of ground coriander worked well. I get the feeling that, without it, the sauce would be a bit ‘thin’ on flavour. The ground fennel was also a good idea. The flavour from the whole seeds was a touch too subtle. In this version of the dish, I think the fish stock is essential, as the curry sauce isn’t actually cooked with the fish steaks and hence gains no flavour from them.

The ambul thiyal certainly worked well for me. Goon said he liked it but he said he thinks swordfish is better with hollandaise, even though he’s not sure he’s ever had hollandaise. Someone figure that one out for me.  I do prefer swordfish with hollandaise. But a change  every now and again is good and this curry certainly complemented the fish well. Experiment succesful.

What? You don’t know rampeh leaf? I guess that’s OK. I didn’t know what it was until a few years ago, which is quite embarrassing given my Sri Lankan heritage.

Rampeh, otherwise known as pandanus amaryllifolius ,or screwpine, is a tree that grows in South East Asia. They can look pretty damn bizarre as they’ve got roots that stick out into the air, like a mangrove tree.  The leaves have a very distinctive smell, which is caramel-like and nutty, and for this reason they’re cultivated and used to flavour food.

I mostly come across rampeh in Sri Lankan cookery, although I’ve seen it mentioned in Thai and Indonesian recipes as well. Usually, a few inches of the leaf  are tied into a little knot and fried up with spices in the early stages of making curries.

Before this week, I’d never cooked with rampeh before, mostly because it’s a bit of a nuisance to find in Britain. You need to go to a specialist shop and even they seem to run out of it reasonably quickly. But, oddly enough, Dad had come across a shop which stocked loads of the stuff,  in Paris of all places! So he brought home a load and I took a few leaves for myself, in time to use them for Weekend Herb Blogging. 

Rampeh and some spices

Since everyone in the world apart from me already knew what weekend herb blogging was before Scott at Real Epicurean decided to host it, I don’t there’s any point in me saying much about it. If you don’t know about it yet, then get with it already!  Start by reading this post at Kalyn’s Kitchen and Scott’s post here.

Anyway, since I conveniently had my rampeh, I thought I’d take the opportunity to make a  authentic (hopefully) Sri-Lankan chicken curry. I did this a few months back, long before I got the hang of this photography business. I didn’t have rampeh then, so it seemed a good dish to try to find out what difference rampeh really made.

My parents make a load of Sri-Lankan curry powder in one go to save time. I don’t make Sri Lankan curries often enough to do this so I tend to do enough for the one curry I’m making that day. The spices above  (cumin, mustard, cinnamon, cloves and cardamom seeds) are dry roasted in a pan seperately until golden brown to enhance their flavour and then ground together into a fine powder. In that picture there should also be fennel and coriander seed but Goon was still rooting around in the cupboards for those when I took the picture. 

The powder you get is much darker than normal curry powder from the local store. The roasting gives it this deeper colour and also enhances the flavour and  aroma.

So now to make the curry. I used skinned chicken thighs and drumsticks for this because, wherever you go in Sri-Lanka, that is what the chicken curry is made from. I have NO IDEA what the hell they do with the breast and wings, but I’ve certainly never seen them in a genuine Sri-Lankan curry!

The recipe for the Sri Lankan Chicken Curry (Kukul Mas)  has been here for ages. I tweaked it just now to include the rampeh. Serve it with kiribath (or string hoppers if you’re lucky enough to have them) and curried lentils or vegetables. 

The verdict on Rampeh: There was a definite difference in flavour between the curry without rampeh and this one, but it’s very hard to describe. Nuttier maybe? I don’t  know -  the flavour is so unique. Anyway, it was a GOOD flavour.

So, my rampeh leaves have now gone in the freezer until the next time I want them, along with some nice looking curry leaves that I’d used to make the lentil side dish for this meal. I’m actually scared by how much that curry looks like the chicken I’d find in Sri-Lanka. Particulary the  dodgy ones you can buy from the little roadside “hotels,” which are damn tasty but tend to leave you bathroom-bound for a few days after.

Fortunately there was none of that with this meal…  just tasty, spicy chicken and lentils with creamy, garlicky kiribath, washed down with a nice medium Riesling from Jacob’s Creek.   

This time I got photos.

The reddy-brown stuff on the right is ”kukul mas.” That’s chicken curry to the rest of us. Like most Sri Lankan curries, it’s very hot. Roasted Sri Lankan curry powder gives it a dark colour and a distinctive flavour. I added  a little bit of paprika to bring out the red colouring. 

I have talked about kiribath before. This time I tried to make it into diamond shaped blocks in the way it is traditionally served. The freshly cooked rice is made into a big rectangle like this.

As it cools, the rice becomes more sticky and you can cut into shapes. You can see these in the top picture.

The yellow curry is bread fruit. This was one of my favourite things when I was growing up. Until last night, I hadn’t had it for years and I was delighted when my Dad brought me some. As far as I’m aware, you can only find bread fruit in cans in Britain with the skin removed and the white flesh chopped into small pieces and cooked. It has a wonderful texture and, when it is heated in a curry, the fruit almost disintegrates. This thickens the curry and makes a wonderfully soft and gooey accompaniment to kiribath. 

There is already a recipe for kiribath here. Try it! It is very nice. Also recipes here for the chicken and the bread fruit.

For some reason I’ve been craving Sri Lankan food recently. This is very weird as I thought my parents’ cooking had put me off it for life.

My parents see food as being purely functional. Everything in the kitchen gets thrown in a pan and stir fried to death. Every vegetable in the fridge gets chopped up, thrown together with soya mince, quorn sausages (yes, they’re veggies) rice, chilli sauce, soy sauce, tomato sauce and lettuce and cooked until the sausages are solid and the lettuce is soggy. Once, for a dinner party, tandoori chicken got made with strawberry yoghurt because Mum thought it wouldn’t make it taste any different. And then there was the lamb chop that was left in the oven so long I thought it was pork. 

However there were some things which I really miss. Mostly things I had on holiday in Sri Lanka. Kiribath is amazing stuff and a well made Sri Lankan fish curry never goes down badly. I’d like to find some breadfruit too.

So I thought I’d give it a go, and it worked. Very well in fact. I made..

Mungatta Kiribath: Kiribath is rice cooked in coconut milk and is traditionally served on New Year, birthdays and other special occasions. It has a risotto like texture, but is slightly more sticky. Its often pressed into a large square and cut into diamond shaped pieces. Mungatta means mung beans. These are sometimes added for a bit of extra texture and flavour.

Fish Curry: Sri Lankan curries are similar to South Indian curries in a lot of ways. There are subtle differences in the spicing. Often a LOT of chilli is used. Also the spices for the curry powder is roasted before being ground, giving the flavour of the curry more depth

I served these with some okra that I fried gently with curry powder and a touch of chilli powder. I would say that it was a big success. It certainly seemed to go down well with my housemates who tried it.