Last month, before I travelled to Sri Lanka, I found myself traveling to another foreign country a little closer to home: Manhattan’s Upper East Side. As any New Yorker will tell you, once you have become ensconced in your neighborhood, it takes effort to trek elsewhere. To a West Villager or a Hells Kitchenite, Chinatown might as well be in China, and forget about heading to the other four boroughs!

Well the Upper East Side has a lot of great stores, but I was on a mission to get some plumbing supplies, a shopping stop which doesn’t often spring to mind when one thinks of the UES. The secondary incentive is that the store is just a few doors away from one of the city’s few stores dedicated completely to cookbooks old and new. I was able to justify my visit to Kitchen Arts and Letters with the idea that I should familiarize myself with Sri Lankan cuisine before I actually arrived there. I am familiar with Indian cuisine but have also learned that the flavors tend to get bolder and spicier as one heads further south on the subcontinent. I wanted to be prepared, so credit card in hand, I picked up a copy of Channa Dassanayaka’s Sri Lankan Flavours (Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne). There were a few other volumes at the store, but this one appealed due to its great design, photography and the personal bits interspersed throughout the book.

Sri Lankan Flavours: A Journey Through The Island’s Food and Culture by Channa Dassanayaka

Channa currently lives in Australia, but his he spent his childhood in Colombo and at his grandparents’ village in the nearby region of Ratnapura. His love of cooking came from spending time in his grandmother’s kitchen, a center of activity not only for his family but for the villagers as well. He went on to train as a chef at the Heritance Kandalama Hotel, an incredibly lush and idyllic resort in Dambulla. His praise of the people and the environment at the Kandalama inspired me to spend a few days there – it was the perfect take-off point to explore the Dambulla cave temples and the rock fortress/palace complex at Sigiriya.

Since my return, I have been cooking a lot out of Sri Lankan Flavours and have been very pleased with the results. My first meal I cooked upon my return was from this book: coconut rice (also known as kiribath), coconut rotis, and a condiment of caramelized onions with dried fish and spices (seeni sambol). These were delicious dishes and reminded me of a lovely breakfast I had of kiribath and seeni sambol made fresh by Trixie, the awesome cook at Templeberg Villa in Galle. I just finished the last of the sambol and will dig into making another batch tomorrow.