Join twowildtides on the country challenge. Each week, we’re going to be heading to a new country (in spirit). Primarily, we’ll be cooking a meal from each country; but we’ll also be watching travel documentaries, reading travel blogs, and listening to music. During the global pandemic, travel is largely inaccessible. We want to reignite our wanderlust, satisfy our travel bug as much as we can, and learn some new things along the way. I have a feeling our bucket list will have a number of items added to it through this experience as well. We created a simple alphabetical spreadsheet with all the countries of the world, and each week we will draw a random number that corresponds with a country on the spreadsheet.
A few weeks ago, I found my journal that I kept during my month-long trip to Sri Lanka. I decided to write a post with excerpts from my journal that published on Monday. A few days later, my Dad called out-of-the-blue and asked me how long my flight was to Sri Lanka– he and a friend were having a conversation about long-haul flights. A couple of days after that, I set the random number generator from 1-197 (that’s how many countries there are) and it landed on 166… Sri Lanka. What are the odds? This week, it’s been three years since my trip. The universe wants me to be thinking about that trip right now and it’s throwing up as many opportunities as possible. Here are some of my favourite stories from my time there:
My absolute favorite thing to eat while in Sri Lanka was Kottu (or Koththu). It’s a stir-fry with chopped roti and it is such a god comfort food. It’s one of the things I miss most about my time there! I always said I’d try to make it myself but never did, so I figured now’s the time. I followed this recipe by The Flavor Bender:
And we used their recipe for the curry blend:
This was also our first week cooking our country challenge meal in our camper. Because kottu has a lot of ingredients, I prepped everything in advance. I chopped all the veggies, cooked and shredded the chicken, and prepared the spice blend at home. Once we got to the camper, all I had to do was take out all the Tupperware containers I packed everything in and get to cooking!
I followed the recipe step-by-step. Fry out the onion, add the garlic and ginger, add the cabbage, leeks, jalapenos, and chicken, add the spice. I made a well in the stir-fry then scrambled the eggs, then distributed the scrambled eggs throughout the stir-fry. Finally, I shredded and added the naan (I couldn’t get roti locally).
As expected, this Kottu was not as good as the stuff I had every other day in Sri Lanka. It didn’t satisfy the craving. That said, this is a great recipe and the Kottu was super tasty. Mack seemed to like it a lot more than me, so unbiased taste buds may be at an advantage! I’m going to keep trying to nail it, so I’ll come back and update this post if I find a recipe that brings all the memories flooding back.
Happy adventuring!
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