In this post: Sri Lankan egg hopper
Lentil dhal
Heyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. It’s Ugly Food for an Ugly Dude – International!
Been a long time since I’ve done a dumb blog post anywhere, including here. Anyway, shut up. I’m back, baby.
Since the last time I posted here intermittently, I’ve had some changes. I’m still meatless. My spouse is meatless too, but not vegan anymore. We still have our dumb dog, Harley. We also sprouted a dumb human child who is like two and a half now. She is an omnivore, meaning that when she doesn’t eat our weird vegetarian foods, she gets frozen chicken nuggets.
But that’s not what this is about. This is a FOOD BLOG!!!! Remember the early 2010s when those were big? It was nice. We had Obama. David Bowie was alive. Welcome back.
Before I get into the main body of this post, here is my solemn promise to you, the reader. I’ll post links to the recipes I use right at the dang top of the post. And if I post an actual recipe myself, I’ll post that at the top as well. I’m not going to make you scroll through all of this garbage to get to the recipe, only for your phone to pop to an inescapable advertisement. Nobody deserves that, not even you.
Typically, we meal-plan for the week on Sunday, do a big grocery shop. So many options, so hard to choose. Do we have the lasagna? Or do we do baked ziti? And what about STUFFED SHELLS! We’ve decided to diversify our meal offerings by sampling Google-able vegetarian recipes from different countries, selected at random by a country generator. It’ll be on a semi-regular basis. I buried that here, mid-sixth-paragraph, but that’s the blog’s new mission statement. I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in writing.
This week’s country is Sri Lanka. I didn’t know anything about Sri Lanka. Now I know two foods. They also had, like, a civil war or something. A big part of writing is research.
The first food we made is “egg hoppers.” Basically, like, a super thin sweet coconut pancake with a fried egg in the middle of it. OR THAT’S WHAT IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE.
Well let’s get this out in the open. There were some issues. I could not find rice flour anywhere, and I looked in ONE STORE. I ended up buying tapioca flour, which is probably the closest to rice flour, because both are types of pudding. Don’t fact check this.
The recipe also calls for proofing/rising in the oven over a pilot light, for three hours. Well, my oven is electric, so I put the sucker on warm. In retrospect, that was too hot. The dough came out as a barely spreadable gel-like dough, and not the pourable batter advertised in the recipe. After the first few came out awful, I added some water to thin the dough – but that just made it sticky and unmanageable.
Finally, the recipe says “The batter is rather simple but, unfortunately, useless without a proper hopper pan.” That sounds like a challenge, rich guy! I used a teeny tiny cast iron skillet, and when that failed, used a regular dang frying pan.
The end result fell right smack in the middle of the mucous<———>marshmallow scale. Is it possible that I screwed this up? Or did I do it perfectly, and Sri Lanka just sucks ass?
The fried egg was good. Served with Morningstar Farms Brand Imitation Cardboard Bacon Product(TM). Wine pairing: Diet Mt. Dew.
If at first you don’t succeed, don’t bother, and go do something else.
The other recipe, lentil dhal, is pret-ty good. It’s yellow, it’s beany, and if you’re not careful you may eat a bay leaf that I forgot to get out of there! Sri Lanka would be proud.
The spices were pretty similar to what we see in our local Indian/Pakistani places. Cumin, turmeric, garam marsala, cinnamon, garlic, ginger, pepper flakes. This specific recipe could have stood to kick its flavors up a notch, BAM!
it looked yellower in person.
Served with steamed basmati rice and storebought naan. Wine pairing: Diet Mt. Dew.
In conclusion, Sri Lanka. I hope you enjoyed your culinary tour. Our next stop will be another island, halfway across the globe.
I’m back until I’m not. Go to hell!
