Apparently Presidential Secretary Lalith Weeratunga has said that the name Ministry Of Crab violates the Constitution and possibly the company registrars act. This is all based on an off-hand joke Mahinda made about how many Ministries he has. I’m going to go with a no.

To buy a good rice and curry you need to find shops which are still home businesses, usually nameless and hidden on the street. If you know where to look, these are the best meals in the city.

Ministry Of Crab is damn good. You get a food high, seriously. They take whatever makes traditional Sri Lankan seafood good, distill it, refine it and lather it over the biggest crustaceans I have seen in my life. Damn good, really. Took some friends from China and the place did Sri Lanka proud.

Restaurants take great effort to entice tourists and locals, and they charge for it. Then they go and spoil it all by putting out boards saying stuff like ‘Wrack of Lamb’ and offering ‘Samwiches’ on the menu. I’m not saying spoken English needs to be perfect, but for a menu or advertisement, it just makes the food look bad.

The Guardian talks about mobile shopping in Jaffna, ie, people delivering coconuts, bread and fish door to door. We have the same thing in Colombo, in Dehiwela at least. In the morning the short-eat trishaw comes around, then the fish and vegetables, basically anything you could need. Coconuts just fall from the tree.

Durian is a strange fruit. It smells like feet, looks like alien fetus and has the texture of a rotten mango. What’s even more strange is that it tastes kinda good, some would say delicious. Now that it’s durian season, the strange smell pervades Havelock Road, but I haven’t had the courage to buy one. If you bring the fruit home, it stinks up the whole house and probably the neighbors too. Instead, I’ve tried two out of home options. One is the durian juice at Bombay Sweet Mahal (Wellawatte). The other is the durian ice cream at Carnival (Bambalapitiya), both on the Galle Road.

In Asian or Sri Lankan cooking, we put a lot of diverse ingredients into a dish. Salt, chili, curry leaves, coconut milk, onions, garlic, green chili. That’s just the base for many Sri Lankan recipes, before you start adding distinctive stuff. In western food, by contrast, the base is less, and less diverse. This seems apparent anecdotally, and also now scientifically. A chemical study has shown that Asian dishes incorporate more diverse flavors than western ones.

Ranjit is a gentleman farmer and I highly recommend his coverage of the ongoing vegetable crate protests. You may remember vegetables from Why Is The Military Selling Vegetables? and Why Are We Throwing Coconuts In The Ocean? Now Minister Johnston Fernando is catching flak for demanding that wholesalers ship vegetables in plastic crates.

Drove through Fort this evening and saw huge pile of tires. Thought it was for the Colombo Night Races at first, but no, they were burnt. Protest tires. No bodies inside though. Bonus. The basic issue is that the government is calling for all vegetables to be transported in plastic crates rather than sacks. The issue with the issue is that plastic crates cost at least Rs. 1000 (according to the farmer blogger Serendipity) and sacks cost like nothing.

Kurt Cobain sang “It’s OK to eat fish, cause they don’t have any feelings.” Indeed, most people don’t empathize with fish at all – I don’t really – despite the fact that we are evolutionary relatives. Pescetarianism is an acceptable form of vegetarianism, and in Sri Lanka dried fish is basically a vegetable. The artist Ted Sabarese has explored our relationship with fish by photographing people with fish that look like them. Interesting results.