Upon our move to New Zealand, which left him stranded in a town called Whangarei, away from his wife and with no substitute cook in sight, my father courageously took it on himself to cultivate his own cooking skills rather than to fall prey to the mediocre take outs around him. And thus the beast was born. Our nightly conversations soon seemed to revolve around, maybe even devolve to, what I had eaten during the day only to be trumped, with much lip-smacking accompanying the relating, by what he had successfully whipped up for himself.

His return to Auckland on the weekends usually meant that new recipes, painstakingly sought out on the internet, would be in hand for experimentation. My mother and I were the natural first-round for guinea pigs, the perfect patient assistants to his Frankenstein intensity and always the consequent cleaners of his hurricane cooking style. However, much to my mother’s despair, he has not only conquered the world of gastronomy but also, much to his pleasure, made quite the name for himself amongst our clan of family and friends.

My father’s unadulterated love for food and his complete commitment to the art of cooking infected me, making me believe that with a just a little dedication and a clear, concise recipe nothing was off limits. And while I resided in New Zealand, where cooking was made rather simple with one-stop-shop supermarkets stocking every possible product necessary to any conceivable recipe, always readily available and clearly labelled, this notion seemed hardly earth-shattering. However, with my return to Sri Lanka, a certain amount of adjustment was needed to be made, both in terms of the way I read recipes and the way I cooked.

My apartment hosts a kitchen 1/3 the size of which I was accustomed to in Auckland, with no fan to ward against the heat. This meant that the cooking time of my dishes cannot be longer than a half an hour or, with not exaggeration intended, I was running the risk of heat stroke. And while I would never demean our supermarkets as primitive in anyway, it must be admitted that certain parts of the cuisine world are made limited to us by a lack of array in products, which means that concessions must be made to substitute to the closest product available. Any idea of a rigid adherence to recipe guidelines will merely leave you unable to make anything.

Thus came about my idea for a personal challenge : to find recipes that I will eat, willingly, and be able to make them, without any harm to myself, in my kitchen with those products available solely in Sri Lanka. Every week will bring a new challenge, with a breakdown concerning the ease in locating the listed ingredients, the prices involved, the substitutes that were made necessary and the total time for cooking. We begin with a fairly simple looking dish : Thai Chicken and Coconut Soup with Noodles.