Stuffed Cuttlefish/ calamari curry - Dello purawala

I remember eating a stuffed calamari curry as a child. My aunt used to stuff the calamari with cooked mung bean, cover the calamari with its own head and secure with a small piece of coconut ekel and simmer the calamari in a thick coconut curry sauce.

When I spoke about this curry many years later when my aunt was living with us in New Zealand, she made the curry once more. That was the last time I had it as my aunt passed away a few months later.

Recently I found some small calamari with heads on at the Sea Mart fish market and I remembered that cherished dish but I had no idea how it was made. I only remembered that my aunt used roasted mung dhall to stuff the calamari.

So I experimented and made a decent curry. Here is the recipe.

 Unfortunately, I don't have photos. Although I photographed the dish in a hurry, I didn't have a memory card in the camera so there are no photos.

Ingredients.

500 gms small or medium cuttle fish, cleaned with heads intact

stuffing:
200 gms roasted mung beans, either halved or crushed roughly (I purchased cleaned and roasted beans which is available in Asian shops)
1 onion, chopped
3 sliced green chillies
a handful of curry leaves
a piece of pandan leaf (rampe)
1 tsp unroasted Sri Lankan curry powder
half a tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp chilli powder
half a cup thick coconut milk
half a cup thin coconut milk
salt to taste (about half a tsp)
2 tbsps. oil

Curry:
1 onion chopped
3 green chillies chopped
1 tsp ginger garlic paste
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 tsp unroasted SL curry powder
1 tsp chilli powder
 a piece of rampe (Pandan leaf) 4 cms long
a piece of cinnamon 4 cms long
half a cup thin coconut milk
half a cup thick coconut milk
1 tomato, peeled and chopped
salt to taste
curry leaves
2 tbsps. oil

Wash and drain the mung beans. Heat the oil in a small pan and when hot fry the curry leaves. Add the onion and green chillie and saute until soft but not browned. Add the turmeric, pandan leaf, curry powder and chilli powder and fry for a minute or so. Add the drained mung and stir well for another couple of minutes. Add thin coconut milk and cook covered until the milk is absorbed. Then add the salt and thick coconut milk and cook till dry. It should not be overcooked. Cool for 10 mts.

Use this mixture to stuff the cuttle fish. Use the heads as a topper to cover and secure with a toothpick or two so that the mixture doesn't seep out. Keep aside.

Meanwhile make a curry but sautéing the onions, curry leaves, rampe and green chilli in oil. Add the ginger garlic paste and stir. Add the cinnamon, curry powder, turmeric, chilli powder. Then add the thin coconut milk and the tomato and cook until done. Add the thick coconut milk and salt. When simmering and thick, carefully place the stuffed cuttlefish in the curry and cook on a medium heat for about 10  mts. Don't overcook as cuttlefish will be rubbery if overcooked.

I found that the cuttlefish generated quite a bit of liquid but I didn't want to overcook them. So I removed the stuffed cuttlefish into a serving dish and boiled down the curry until it was quite thick and then spooned it over the curry.

Serve with rice and a few other curries. I served it with a green mallun, pol sambal and devilled potato with rice.
 

Easy to make Milk Rice (Kiribath) in a rice cooker

Kiri bath literally translated is milk rice and is Sri Lanka's most famous festive dish without any debate.

The prominence of milk rice eaten at auspicious occasions may go back to the story of it being offered to Lord Buddha whose first meal after enlightenment was Kiri pidu offered to him by a village damsel called Sujatha. The venue of this is still a much visited stop by Sri Lankan Buddhist pilgrims to India.

Kiri bath is usually the first food fed to babies, is cooked at the auspicious time on New Years day to be the star of the New Year table; offered as Buddha pooja to Lord Buddha; fed by bridegrooms to brides at their wedding, a must at any auspicious event; even cooked on the first day of every month to bring luck which was a custom my mother and her mother before her practiced till their deaths and which I tend to follow - if I am not too busy to forget it even after living out of Sri Lanka for almost 4 decades.

Kiribath for breakfast fit for royalty with Fish Ambul Thiyal and Katta Sambal

Milk rice is similar and yet is different to the coconut rice served in other parts of Asia. It is not cooked in coconut milk from the beginning as coconut rice is and is moulded and flattened. It is one of the simplest dishes to make and is usually a major hit with my non Sri Lankan friends.

Milk rice is usually a breakfast dish but there is no reason why you cannot eat it for lunch or dinner as I do.

We Lankans eat Kiri bath with an assortment of side dishes such as seeni sambol (a kind of caramelised onion spiced with chilli, spices and cooked in tamarind and coconut milk with a little sugar added to it for that extra touch), Katta sambal or lunu miris, a hot concoction of ground salt, onion, chilli and Maldive fish (see my blog post on Katta Sambal), fish or meat curry or my favourite canned fish or Salmon curry. A sweeter version of Kiri bath is made by forming balls of milk rice moulded using either a tea cup or banana leaf to balls slightly elongated on both ends and with a sweet filling of Pani pol, cooked spicy filling made out of grated coconut and treacle or jaggery. Traditionally a bark from the Arecanut tree (puwak kola patha) was used for this but I don't know if they even exist now.

A diamond of Kiribath served with Katta sambal and fish Ambul Thiyal
 

I have recently modernised this dish by making Imbul kiribath stacks made with disks of milk rice with a layer of Pani pol in between. You can also make a savoury version using Katta sambal as a filling and that's the topic of another blog post when I get around to making them.

Now for my recipe for making it with or without a rice cooker.

A plate of Kiribath
 

Rice cooker version

Ingredients:
2 cups short grain, jasmine or Kiribath rice or even sushi rice (which are stickier versions of rice)
3 cups of water
1.5 cups thick canned coconut milk or coconut cream
1.5 tsp salt

Wash rice. Drain. Add the water and cook till done. Then add the coconut milk and salt and switch on back to Cook and cook till the milk is absorbed.

Spoon into a flat plate quickly and flatten out with the back of a spoon and shape  to form a flat raised mound, flattening the tops and sides alternately using either a banana leaf/folded piece of foil or wax paper. Cool and cut into squares or diamonds.

Serve with an assortment of side dishes such as Katta sambal, seeni sambal, fish or meat curry.

Stove top version

Ingredients:
2 cups short grain, jasmine or Kiribath rice or even sushi rice (which are stickier versions of rice)
3 cups of water
1.5 cups thick canned coconut milk or coconut cream
1.5 tsp salt

Wash rice well and place in saucepan with the water. Bring the water to the boil and cook rapidly till most of the water evaporates. Lower heat to very low and cover saucepan with lid and cook on very low heat for about 10 mts without opening the lid and the temptation to peek. Rice should be almost cooked.
Add the salt and coconut milk and cover and cook on low heat till cooked. Use the same method to flatten the rice on a plate.

Katta sambal/lunu miris. chilli sambal or Sri Lankan dynamite

My mother or her trustworthy Kussi amma (literally translated as Kitchen Mother or maid) would have laughed their heads off if they saw me publishing a for a very common Sri Lankan dish - Katta sambola or Katta sambal.



My home made Katta Sambal
 

A woman who couldn't make a simple Katta sambal would not be considered to be a woman in their book I guess.

Various brands of Katta sambal available for sale to us now

If you ask any Kussi Amma worth her salt or any village housewife or even a young girl in a village, they would tell you how to make a decent Katta Sambal, a ground concoction made with a couple of red onions, salt, fresh chillies and with the addition with Maldive fish or Umbalakada, ground on a grinding stone and mixed with a little lime juice.

Katta sambal is served with rice, rotis, hoppers or Aappa or eaten with bread. It is a food of the humble poor man. Rice and sambal is meant to be the ultimate poor man's meal.

I craved for a decent Katta sambal when I moved out of Sri Lanka. However, I lived in a place where there were no grinding stones, no hot chillies and certainly no Maldive fish. My parents used to send me care packages of Sri Lankan spices and ones I received a small packet of Maldive fish and I managed to mix it up with sliced white onion, a bit of chilli powder sent from home, ground on a stolen mortar and pestle from the Chemistry laboratory at university and added some lemon juice and made my first sambal. Many years later I still remember how it tasted with some kiribath (milk rice) I made with fresh milk eaten with a few friends in my student hostel.

Living overseas now is not as lonesome as it was when I moved out of Sri Lanka in my late teens. Now I can buy most Sri Lankan food at one of three Sri Lankan shops in Auckland and even in my local Indian shops. One day, a lady in my local Sri Lankan shop was telling me how she marvelled at a nice white man who comes to her shop and calls her auntie and buys bottles of Katta sambal among other things. When she tried to tell him that it was really hot, he had said that he can eat hot food as his mother in law cooks Sri Lankan food. On questioning him, she found that the young white man was my son in law who has a penchant for Katta sambal who even keeps a bottle at work to eat with his lunchtime sandwich.

I still like to make my Katta sambal at home although I can easily buy it over the counter mainly as I don't like anything with preservative in it. All the brands of Katta sambal contains "preservative" but I don't know if it is natural, manmade or unnatural. So despite the other half and son and heir wagging their heads and rolling eyes skyward and wonder why I cannot buy this delicacy like other normal people, I continue to make my own Katta sambal which they devour without hesitation by the bottle.

The other day, a few people who tasted my Katta sambal wanted to know where I bought it so decided to share the recipe particularly for those like me who may be out of their homeland and are craving for Sri Lankan food.

I use the food processor to make my Katta sambal and it is really easy. Here is the recipe.

1 medium red onion chopped roughly
2 tsps. salt
10 tsps. chilli pieces or keli miris
5 tsps. Maldive fish flakes
juice of a small lime or half a lemon

Process the salt and red onion for a  few seconds, add the chilli pieces and process for a couple of minutes.

Lastly add the Maldive fish flakes and process until well mixed and you cannot see the chilli seeds. Lastly add the lime juice and mix.
Store in a dry bottle and keep in fridge.
Makes one jam jar.

Should last for a couple of weeks in fridge.

Hint: - if Maldive fish is not available, you can substitute dried prawns  which you can buy in Asian grocery shops but it alters the taste.

If you don't have a food processor, you can make it with a mortar and pestle with a lot more elbow grease.
 

Welcome to Asoka's Sri Lankan Kitchen

Ayubowan! Vanakkam! That is hello to you in Sinhala and Tamil, the two languages of Sri Lanka.

I was born in Sri Lanka although I have lived out of that beautiful island for more than half of my life leaving the country as a teenager.  However, I've always had a keen interest in cooking the food of my motherland even when I lived in countries where there were no Sri Lankan food items available for sale.
Currently I live in Auckland, New Zealand which has now become a really diverse city where we can lay our hands on most ingredients to cook Sri Lankan. It wasn't like this when I moved to NZ two decades ago when we had to go to the city to the one Indian shop where I would buy coriander, cumin and fennel seeds to make my own curry powder.

I know how hard it can be to produce our food when you live overseas. When I was a student in a foreign university, there were no spices that could cook our food unless our parents sent them in food parcels and we guarded those spices stingily until our next overseas trip to London where we could stock up on spices, Maldive fish and even dried curry leaves.

When I am creating recipes, I keep in mind people who may not have the luxury of obtaining a lot of the ingredients to create the tastes of Sri Lanka. Therefore, I will use substitutes and sometimes make stuff from scratch and provide hints to the amateur cook or the non Sri Lankan who would like to try their hands cooking Sri Lankan.

There are hundreds of cooking sites, many cook books and recipes online and I didn't want to start yet another blog on Lankan cooking.  The other day, I was gifted a Sri Lankan cookbook which I grabbed gleefully. However, on turning the pages, I found butter chicken, Tandoori chicken and korma within the first chapter and was saddened that Indian staples are passed off as Sri Lankan. On another occasion, a friend and I saw a sign advertising Sri Lankan lumprice at a food fair and were horrified when the man lined a foam container with a strip of banana leaf and served some yellow rice, a brinjal curry, a boiled egg and a chicken drumstick and a cutlet with seeni sambal from his rice and curry stall and passed it out to non suspecting expats as lumprice. My setting up this blog was to dispel such incorrect portrayal of food as authentic Sri Lankan.

I am not a trained chef but I have cooked since I was a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Colombo, learning from my mother and my aunts who were wonderful cooks. I also learnt cooking from some great ladies who conducted cookery classes such as Mrs Soma Gunawardena, Mrs Dickman and Mrs Mallika Joseph.  They taught me how to cook elegant dinner party food and make cakes.

Later, I conducted my own cooking classes  to my work colleagues and also taught Wilton cake decorating at my cousin Wasantha De Silva's famous cookery classes held in Gampola. After leaving the shores of Sri Lanka, I underwent some cordon bleu training in the UK and took cake decorating classes in Canada. Most of my knowledge comes from self learning and experimenting. I wrote a cookery column "Food Around the World" for Lanka Woman, the then only English language weekly for women in Sri Lanka. I had a page on the Ammas.com website (click on link) since 2000 which was very popular and I was on the Council of Ammas for cooking, lifestyle and marriage. I have blogged about crafts, gardening and healthy food before.

The purpose of this blog is to contribute my experience as a hobby cook, a food writer for a few decades and an enthusiastic foodie who wants people outside of Sri Lanka to cook authentic Sri Lankan food that their mothers, grandmothers and family members cooked. I was inspired by the generations of my daughter and grand daughter who may one day want to cook the foods of their childhood.  I also want non Sri Lankans all over the world like my Dutch son in law, my Aussie nephew  and my Kiwi soul mates Angela and Kiran who enjoy Lankan food to experiment with the wonderful tastes of Lankan cooking.

I hope you will join in my journey in experimenting with authentic Sri Lankan cooking.