Ceylonta

I'm very excited to have found Dine and Dish's Adopt-a-Blog event. This event is pairing new food bloggers with more established food blogs for the purpose of encouraging new bloggers, supporting others with like minded interests, and building friendships within the food blogging community.

Equal Opportunity Kitchen has been paired with Redacted Recipes. Redacted Recipes is run by Ann and Jack. Their food blog has been around since 2005. Although, I'm not an expert in classifying food, I would say that many of their recipes feature a rustic style or Middle Eastern (or North African -- Moroccan) feel to them.

They've got some great seasonal recipes to try over at their blog. In particular, I'd like to try their Chicken Kebabs with Spicy Rice (perhaps when the BBQ is up and running again), the Moroccan Tomato Salsa, the Thai Beef Salsa, Linguine with Tomato and Basil, Apple Cake and Apple Cranberry Crisp. I also couldn't help but really want to get a Tagine after seeing theirs.

Seeing such a variety of dishes among all of the food blogs out there really makes me want to experiment more, both in and out of my own kitchen. Last night, we tried a Sri Lankan restaurant. My first foray into Sri Lankan (and South Indian) food. It was really good. I had to keep reminding myself to eat the food with my right hand as traditionally, Sri Lankan cuisine is eaten with the fingers of the right hand.

As an appetizer, the three of us (R, me and a friend) had Kadalai Vadai and a Vegetable Samosa. The dipping sauce was some sort of spicy cucumber type sauce that was really good. Please excuse the pictures - the restaurant was dark and R and my friend were not very patient with my picture taking (I'm always shocked that everyone in the restaurant isn't taking pictures of their food).



The main meal, kind of like Chinese food, are meant to be shared among everyone at the table. We went with two dishes that were safer bets:

Chicken Kothu



Curried Shrimp (which was awesome).



We kept ordering more nan to take full advantage of all of the curry sauce.



Our "riskier" dish was a Vegetable Thali - 6 separate vegetable dishes. In our case, the vegetable dishes were lentil, spinach, beets, eggplant, chickpea and beans.



Some of the vegetables were better than the others -- favourites were lentils and spinach.

We left full and happy.