Chef Saiju Thomas is pleased as Punch at the response to the Sri Lankan Food festival, which he has curated, is drawing.
Ergo he is planning to extend the festival that is to conclude on July 27. Till it is on it will serve diners with true-blue Lankan fare.
Saiju worked in a Caribbean cruise liner with a Lankan cuisine speciality restaurant where he honed his skills at this cuisine. Sea food, he says forms the staple diet of the islanders. Coconut is most commonly used and finds itself in different forms in all the dishes.
So if it’s rice or vegetables, meat or lentils coconut is used. Sri Lankans savour different kinds of sambals, which is a salad accompaniment with the main dish. So there is papaya, tomato or pineapple sambal to choose from. Rice akin to its place in Kerala cuisine is eaten at most meals. It comes in different varieties, flavoured with lime, lemon grass, coconut or just plain boiled. Idiappam and puttu too are common to the food of both Kerala and Sri Lanka.
The egg appam (mutta appam) is a speciality; another favourite dish is malupol grilled, which is coconut marinated fish wrapped in banana leaf and cooked. It is similar to our “polichathu” dishes, says Saiju.
Rampe, a herb, curry leaves and drumstick leaves too find ample use in the food.
At the fest there is a colourful mix of all this and for the vegetarians there is the Vattakka curry made from yellow pumpkin with roasted rice and coconut. “It has a unique flavour,” says the chef.End the meal on a sweet note with semolina cake or neera syrup with coconut palm sugar or jaggery. Both carry the sweetness of the land and its people, believes the chef. The fest is open for dinner till July 27 at Eighth Bastion, Fort Kochi