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.
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.
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