About

Howdy. I’m Laurie, and I’ll be your, ah, guide on this odd journey. I’m a Canadian living in Sri Lanka and I have an unusually high tolerance for spicy food. I love chocolate and virgin pina coladas and walks in the rain. Er, wait…

*cough* Right. Erm, I experiment a lot. Being a Canadian in Sri Lanka and this being a third world country, although I believe the politically correct term is developing, there are a lot of things that one can’t get, so I either make do or do without or experiment rabidly. Apparently, I opted for rabid. And long run-on sentences.

Not all my experiments turn out, but enough do that it’s well worth continuing.  Plus I’m tenacious (read: stubborn) anyway… I even post about my failures and Frankensteins.

If you’re looking for recipes that involve cans of this, bags of that, this kind of mix or that, you might as well go somewhere else. I rarely use cans, bags, or mixes. I’ve always been a cook-from-scratch kinda gal and I’ve been cooking for forever, so it’s all old hat. Plus canned goods here are extremely limited here in Sri Lanka, mixes even more so. One of these days I’ll have to see if I can take photos at the grocery store without getting caught by security…

I bake sourdough bread (no commercial yeast in my baking), although that’s a series of blogs posts all on its own. Seeing as how I’m married to a Sri Lankan and live in a Sri Lankan household, I cook a lot of Sri Lankan curries & sambols & mallungs & sweets & such. Because I get bored easy, I cook a fairly wide variety of food from all over the world. One of these days, I’ll have to explain the origins of that. I bake cakes and brownies and, well, whatever strikes my fancy, all from scratch. And I talk about local food, whether I cook it or not, including local fruits and vegetables, many of which I had never seen before coming to Sri Lanka.

Really, I get a bee up my butt to try something new, and I research recipes, usually on the Internet since I have very few cookbooks here (the rest stayed in Canada when I left to come here), and then I experiment.

If you want to know more about my life in Sri Lanka, check out A Canadian in King Parakramabahu’s Court, which is all about that. If you want to browse through my many photos, check out my photo album, with many pictures I still need to blog about. If you want to know more about my writing life, both freelance writing & editing as well as science fiction & fantasy, check out my writing blog, Peregrinas. If you want to check out my professional writing credentials, that’s all on my main page. If you want to check out the hubby, the reason I moved to Sri Lanka, check out his blog.

I hope you enjoy the ride.