Sri Lankan Pumpkin Curry (Wattakka)

Today I need to boost up some curries that I made yesterday. There is not quite enough for two more meals but too much for one. Oh I'm just realizing that us adults don't need lunch tomorrow because we have to go for an on site review at the university. With a bit of luck they will provide us with lunch. Actually I'm pretty sure that hubby will get lunch (he's higher up on the ladder). But I've started cooking my pumpkin so there is no going back now.

As you have probably read by now, I am not 100% Sri Lankan. So my mum never cooked traditional Sri Lankan food. Yes, she cooked curry but there were some things she would just not do. Either because they were too time consuming or because she didn't have the correct implements. Because of this we never had traditional pumpkin curry at home. I absolutely adored it and would stuff myself whenever I got it at my aunts homes. Generally pumpkin is not considered a fancy dish, so you don't get it when there is a celebration. It's more the type of food you get when you go home with your cousins and share whatever has been cooked. Even better if you were not expected!

Now I think I have finally found a way to cook the pumpkin somewhat like my aunts. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I do. The secret ingredient is ground brown mustard seeds!

Preparation time: 45 minutes ; serves 4 - 8 (depending on how many other curries you have)

Ingredients:

750 g	Pumpkin (any type, cooking  time may vary)
1/2 cup	Diced onions
1 tbsp.	Finely diced garlic
1/4 tsp.	Tumeric
1/2 tsp.	Chili powder (or to taste)
2	Green chilies, sliced
10	Black pepper seeds
	Water to cover
1 tsp.	Salt
1 sprig	Curry leaves
1/4 tsp.	Dill seeds
2 tsp.	Brown mustard seeds
1 cup	Thick coconut milk

Method:
Before you start note that the mustard seeds are NOT optional. You can leave out many things but not the mustard. You will also need a good grinder and a stone mortar and pestle. 

You can use any pumpkin you like to make this. The cooking time will of course vary according to which type you use. You can cook it with or without the skin, also depending on the type. In these pictures I used hokkaido pumpkin. You need to cut the pumpkin into cubes around 1 inch cube. The pumpkin will disintegrate if you cut it too small, which is also a reason why you might want to keep the skin on. In my case I removed the skin.

The first step is easy enough. Put all the ingredients except the mustard seeds and coconut in a pot. Do not put too much water. If you have too much water at the end this can be saved by using coconut cream or coconut milk powder. Cover and bring to the boil and then reduce the heat and simmer (12 - 20).

While this is going on you can prepare the mustard. This is how I did it. I first put my seeds into the grinder attachment of my Sumeet (which is a really good, heavy duty Indian liquidizer/grinder) and ground until I had a kind of fine powder. You can probably do this in any spice grinder, or if you don't have one you can use a mortar and pestle or a 'miris gala'. Sadly to release the flavour that you need for this curry this powder is not enough. I put my powder into a granite mortar, added about a teaspoon of water (water is really important), and ground until I had a smooth paste.

You need 1 teaspoon of this paste. Save any extra paste that you may have, you can put it in sandwiches or any where else that you would use mustard. You must have a granite/stone mortar. It won't work with a wooden one. Believe me, I have tried!

Once your pumpkin is just about (al dente) cooked mix the mustard into the coconut milk and then into the pumpkin curry. If you use coconut cream from a can use about 1/2 cup adding some water, if necessary. If you use coconut milk powder it is best to pour out extra water that you might have in the pot and mix the milk powder with this water. Pumpkin is very watery, so the curry tends to become too liquidy very quickly. If you use fresh coconut milk then it will probably be a bit liquid, but on the other hand you've gained on the taste. Do not cover the curry. Bring to the boil and it is ready to serve.

Seeni Sambol - Sri Lankan sweet onion sambol

To make your new year table complete here is my seeni sambol recipe. The longer you cook it, the better it gets. It also freezes well so it makes sense to make more than you need to heat up later. In fact it sometimes tastes better when you reheat it! I bet it can also be canned or put in a jar. It's best to make it at least the day before you need it so that the flavours can intensify.

Preparation time: Minimum 2 hours (up to 4 hours); makes 4 cups 

Ingredients:

1 kg	Red onions, Big onions or Bombay onions (depending on where you live and how old you are!)
250 g	Shallots (Rathu lunu, small red onions)
1/4 cup	Oil
3 sprigs	Curry leaves
2 inches	Rampe leaves (pandan leaves)
200 g	Tomatoes, diced
1 tbsp.	Garlic pulp
1 tbsp.	Ginger pulp
1 bulb	Lemon grass (sera)
3	Chilies
2 tsp.	Chili powder (you can put more or less depending on your taste)
2 tsp.	Salt
10	Cardamoms, bruised
10	Cloves
4 inches	Cinnamon (Sri Lankan)
2 tbsp.	Tamarind pulp
1 tbsp.	Lemon or lime juice
1/4 cup	Sugar
250 g	Maldive fish (makes it non-vegetarian but more traditional)

Method:
This is quite easy to make. The most trouble you will have is with getting the ingredients (if you don't usually cook Sri Lankan food and don't live in Sri Lanka) and cutting the onions. The part I hate the most is peeling and cutting the onions. I cry, my nose runs, my glasses get sticky, and the kitchen stinks!! To reduce the pain I use a kitchen machine to do the actual cutting. The difference between a refined seeni sambol and a regular one is how fine your onions are cut. The finer the better.

Above you can see what I mean by red onions and shallots. European shallots are much larger than Sri Lankan ones and thus easier to cut and clean. If you want to make your life easy you can just use the bigger onions (so 1.25 kg). If you want more taste you can use a ratio of 1:1. 

Make sure you have prepared all your spices before you continue. Bruise the lemon grass and the cardamoms (i.e. hit them with a rolling pin so that they release their flavour). 

Cinnamon, ginger, green chilies, garlic, lemon grass

Cinnamon (again!), cloves, chili powder, cardamom

The amount of chili you use will depend on your taste. (I cut my green chilies into large pieces so that they can be picked out). The best cinnamon to use is Sri Lankan. It is still rolled by hand and gives the best flavour. As you might notice some of my spices are frozen i.e. lemon grass, chilies, rampe and curry leaves. 

Red onions, rampe, curry leaves

I find that they keep best frozen. Curry leaves are okay dried but freezing really retains the flavour of the leaves much better. I don't like using pre-pulped garlic and ginger. It tastes weird, so I grate mine fresh each time.

Once you have everything ready heat the oil over moderately high heat and once the oil is hot fry the curry leaves, rampe and a handful of chopped onions. Once the onions are soft you can add the rest of the onions and then the tomatoes, garlic, ginger, lemon grass, chilies, chili powder, salt,  cardamoms, cloves, cinnamon and tamarind. 

In Sri Lanka this dish is not traditionally vegetarian. Usually people add a type of dried fish called Maldive fish. It is very hard and used to be only available as a hard block. I remember my mother chipping off pieces of the rock hard fish with a nut cracker while watching the sun go down over the hills. Knives couldn't get through it and electric grinders would break. Sri Lankan's usually pound it in this primitive pounder (Vangediya).  

Nowadays you can buy it pre-pounded in Sri Lanka. It's hard to get anywhere other than a Sri Lankan store and even they might not carry it. But if you like fish add this to your sambol now.

Stir everything together and cook over a low flame forever. 

I cooked mine for 1.5 hours. After which I put up the heat and cooked off all the moisture. Be careful to stir to prevent burning. For some reason this took around 30 minutes, but I was in the kitchen anyways! Now it's time to add the sugar and lemon juice. Stir them well. After that I let it cook on low heat for another 15 - 20 minutes, got bored, put the cooker off and went to bed. Of course you could cook it for less.

This morning I picked out all the inedible spices like the rampe, cinnamon, lemon grass, and put it in a bowl to serve with milk rice for new year. 

Actually looks darker than this!

You can eat seeni sambol with anything. It goes exceptionally well with milk rice. Another much loved way to eat it is in seeni sambol buns. Just make a regular bread dough and stuff this inside. We also use it to fill sandwiches with thickly spread butter. Plus you can eat it as a side with rice and curry. Try it, you'll love it!

Sri Lankan Milk Rice

The new year is almost upon us. As in many Sri Lankan households we celebrate new year with a traditional meal of milk rice, seeni sambol and pani (and untraditionally with red lentil curry!). Took me forever to figure out how to make milk rice correctly. It should be relatively simple, but I could never get it just right. One Sri Lankan new year my aunty Rosie was standing by and showed me how to make it properly. So it is for all of you who have been struggling and for those of you who want to try a new type of milk rice. For all you Germans out there, you can eat this with Zimtzucker just like normal German milk rice (note that it is not as liquid as the German variety).

Preparation time: 1 hour; serves 6 

Ingredients:

2 cups	Rice (raw rice)
3 cups	Water
1 tsp.	Sugar
2 tsp.	Salt
4	Cardamom pods
40 g	Butter (or 3 tbsp. ghee)
2 cups	Coconut milk

Method:
First of all, the cups above are American cups (around 240 ml). If you use a rice cooker cup then use 3 cups rice, 4.5 cups water and 2 cups coconut milk.

Wash the rice until the water runs clear. I usually wash it around 4 times. I cannot be bothered washing it more than that, so my water does not usually run clear! Drain the rice and put it in a pan so that it has enough room to expand. Go for at least 4 times the volume of the rice.

Bruise the cardamom pods (i.e. hit them with rolling pin or pound a couple of times in a mortar). You just want to make sure they are open. I have recollection of just biting them open many, many years ago! Add the water, sugar, salt, butter and cardamom pods to your pan. Put the lid on (very, very important that you have a lid that fits well so that no steam escapes) and cook on high until the water boils.

In the mean time prepare your coconut milk. I used coconut milk powder to produce my milk. 8 heaped tablespoons made up to 2 cups of liquid with warm water gave me the milkyness that I needed. If you use canned coconut milk you might want to water it down a bit. All depends on how creamy and coconuty you want your rice. The really thick one that I can get I would put half coconut cream and half water. The coconut milk in the brown can I would not dilute. Then heat up your coconut milk either in the microwave or in a pan. Bring it to the boil.

Once the water boils, stir, reduce the heat to the minimum, add the hot coconut milk and then close the lid. Allow the rice to cook for a further 20 minutes.

Once it is cooked turn it out onto a plate. The traditional thing to do would be to flatten it with a banana leaf, I just used a piece of foil and used a chopping board to flatten the top. Then cut the rice into diamond shapes (I'm not very good at this part!). You can only really do this shaping when the rice is hot. If you try to do it later it will not form into stable lumps. I've tried heating up the rice later and forming it but that does not work very well. You can serve it with a multiple of things. I'll post seeni sambol (onion sambol with a bit of sugar) soon but you can also eat it with hakuru, pol pani, or curry.

Coffee aroma reindeer tealight holder

This project started out with someone wanting to make a garland for their bedroom for Christmas (it was not me!). I got roped into it because I am gullible when it comes to children wanting to do crafts! It turned into a pretty tea light holder that yesterday turned into one with a coffee aroma. Perfect for gloomy winter days.

You will need:

1 A4 sheet of coloured paper (or letter size if you are in the USA. Your garland will be a bit shorter.)
1 metal lid from a jam jar
Strong glue (we used Uhu)
Transparent, non-flammable paper (about 1/2 an A4 sheet)
A thin tipped black felt tipped pen
5 - 6 white jewels and one red one
2 handfuls of coffee beans
A tealight

Method:

We started with the reindeer and found him (and a few other friends) at this website https://www.woojr.com/christmas-paper-chains/christmas-paper-chains/ . We printed out this template and followed the instructions to make the garland (the instructions are on the template) using brown paper. Cutting it was rather fiddly so we took turns to cut it out. If you want something quicker you should consider the snow man or the Christmas tree.

After the garland was cut out I was deserted! The reason being that the garland was too short to go across the door and there was no way that my child was going to cut out a second one (very low attention span!). I did not want to trash the reindeer because they looked so cute.

Using a thin black felt tip pen I gave the reindeer some eyes and then stuck on the jewels for the noses. I was constantly visited by my daughter so that she could give me advice, which is why one of the reindeer has a red nose (Rudolf of course!).

I then rummaged around in our box of jam jars to find a lid that was the right size to wrap the reindeer around. I also found a piece of transparent paper left over from making tiny origami lampshades for a string of fairy lights.

I measured the circumference of the lid and cut out a rectangle from the transparent paper that was a centimeter longer than the circumference and as wide as the reindeer were tall. Then I stuck the reindeer to the transparent paper and the transparent paper to the rim of the lid (the inside of the lid upwards). If you want a sturdy construction you might use a glue gun to secure the paper to the lid.

Finally, we put a handful of coffee beans in the lid and settled a tea light on top of them. Now we have a wonderful coffee smelling tea light holder!!

You can use any of the templates above and any coloured paper, be creative! We'd love to see your products.

Sore Throat Tea (Sage/Lemon)

We're through the first outbreak of sore throats and coughs and now we are battling the second. Cough syrups don't work so well for us so we drink a lot of tea instead. In an attempt to use up the herbs that are growing in our garden we try all kinds of things. Sometimes stumbling on something amazing. This tea (or herbal infusion to be exact) is definitely one of those things. All four of us have tried it and all agree that it works well to sooth the throat and it tastes good.

For one cup all you need is around 4 leaves of fresh sage (Salbei in German), 2 slices of lemon and some honey. Put the sage and the lemon in a cup (or pot) and pour boiling water over it. Let it sit for 6 - 8 minutes, strain and add honey to taste.

Enjoy this hot and you can literally feel it soothing your throat.

NOTE: Be careful which lemons you use since many have chemicals sprayed on them that are not for human consumption. If you are not sure if you can eat the rind, just squeeze some lemon juice into your tea instead.

Twig door wreath

The kindergarten my children attended always has an Advent Bazzar in November. All the produce sold is made by the parents under the guidance of a very crafty teacher. One of the years they made these awesome wreaths made of twigs. They basically had a whole heap of someones garden trimmings and they molded them into shape and tied them together with brown wire.

Unfortunately I was not in the group that made the wreaths (I was busy managing the truffle making) so I don't know exactly how they made them. I did however manage to find a tutorial on YouTube that is pretty good.

Once you have the wreath the only thing that limits you is your imagination and wallet. I found some left over ribbon to make a huge bow for the bottom, bought a few cheap Christmas balls and used a string of plastic fall decorations to get a bit of colour.

I was very careful to use light weight things because we cannot nail anything into, or hook anything onto our door. It has to be held up with sticky tape!!

While decorating I found it best to hang the wreath up on a door so that I could see how everything fell (literally sometimes!). If using glass ornaments I would seriously advise you to put a thick blanket on the floor!

The whole thing is hung up by a matching ribbon (I ran out of left overs and picked up a new roll from IKEA, if I hadn't found it I would have just used wool) which is passed over the top of the door and stuck down with tape on the inside. Very, very heavy duty tape!

If your door can bear it the lights suggested in the tutorial are wonderful addition.

Recipe Index

This is not really a post! I cannot figure out how to make an index for my recipes, which I badly need. I could use a webpage instead of a blog but then I would have to pay for it (I'm a cheapo!). Note that homemade can be interpreted as being made from scratch. Everything is vegetarian, those marked with a V are vegan.

Soups:

Butternut squash soup
Mushroom soup
Pumpkin and potato soup - half an hour

Sri Lankan curries:

Bean curry V, gluten free
Breadfruit curry V, gluten free
Dahl, red lentil V, gluten free
Drumstick (Murunga) curry V, gluten free
Eggplant curry V, gluten free
Fried bitter gourd curry (karavila) V, gluten free
Potato and pea curry - tempered (fried) V, gluten free
Pumpkin curry V, gluten free
Sweet onion sambol - seeni sambol V, gluten free
TVP (soya chunk) curry V, gluten free

Breakfast:

American pancakes
Boiled eggs
Crows nest - half an hour
French toast
Granola - homemade V
Sri Lankan milk rice V, gluten free
Waffles (German style)

Mains:

Bi bim bap, gluten free
Caramelized leek quiche
Channa Masala (chickpeas) with spinach V, gluten free
Cauliflower bake - Cheesy
Cauliflower cashew curry with coconut milk V, gluten free
Eggplant Parmesan
Eggplant with tofu - Chinese V, gluten free
Fried eggplant quiche
Fried rice - fusion variation V, gluten free
Falafel V

Grilled mini-eggplant V, gluten free
Lasagna
Linguini in creamy mushroom sauce - half an hour
Mac and cheese
Makhouda D'Aubergine (or Batu Quiche)
No bake pan pizzas
Pad Thai, gluten free
Panner tikka masala, gluten free
Pasta with zucchini, mushrooms and sun dried tomatoes
Potato gratin
Persian omelet (with potatoes and spinach)

Phyllo pie V
Pot pie V
Pumpkin ravioli - homemade

Roast peppers, stuffed with spiced rice V
Spaghetti bolognese - half an hour V
Spinach pie

Stuffed Hokkaido pumpkin 
Stuffed zucchini V (if you omit the parmesan)
Tomato pasta sauce - homemade V, gluten free
Vegetarian stir fry (Chinese) - half an hour V, gluten free
Wirzing pie (savoy pie)

Sides & Snacks:

Bratkartoffeln - pan fried potatoes V, gluten free
Chapati V
Croutons - homemade V

Grilled mini-eggplant V, gluten free
Guacamole V, gluten free
Hummus V, gluten free
Mexican (Spanish) rice V, gluten free
Refried beans V, gluten free
Rosemary garlic focaccia
Salsa - V, gluten free

Summer rolls - Vietnamese V, gluten free
Thosai (urid dahl pancakes) V
Vegetarian Chili V

Sweets and Desserts:

Apfelkuchen, apple pie, apple tart
Brownies
Chocolate chunk cookies (soft)
Chocolate mousse, gluten free
Coffee meringue cake gluten free
Cupcakes
Cut out cookies - the best ever
Lemon slices

Mango coconut tart - dairy free
Milk toffee - Sri Lankan style, gluten free
Red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting
Rhubarb strawberry crumble
Scotch crispies

Miscellaneous:

Sri Lankan roasted curry powder V
Basic pastry
Sweet pie crust