Sunday, January 10, 2010

The best meal of the season

You know I love my meals. Be it paang, halmasso thel dala and pol sambol from sea lord or masso kade as is more aptly called by my colleagues to dim sum at the Emperors wok I can appreciate and enjoy anything from anywhere. This season I had been having meals from far and wide and while every meal had something good about it there was nothing special in them worthy of a post.
I am a strong believer that Life always throws us the most wonderful surprises and this season too the most wonderful meal I had was from a totally unexpected situation. It was from a funeral! Yes the Mala Batha!
And the amazing thing is I nearly missed it. If not for providence I would say.
Well my cousins husbands dad passed on xmas night and I had to attend the funeral which was in panadura in fact it was more closer to Wadduwa. And after the funeral we went to the house as was custom. And they started serving buiscuits and drinks and we thought there would be no Mala Batha as tradition. When we were about to say our goodbyes we were told how can you leave without sharing the meal. Generally we would have made excuses but this time something prompted us to eat. Woooow what a meal it was. To describe it as "heavenly" would be an understatement. The traditional "mala batha" or post funeral meal consists of dried fish and vegetables and is tad boring. But this was not your traditional meal. For instance in addition to the usual curries there was beef as well as fish made in the traditional fashion. And every morsal was amazingly tasty. In fact I had two servings. Apparently in these villages there is a funeral society and they handle the arrangements in the case of a death of a member. The meal was cooked by the members of this society as on open fires. And someone told me that all the meals during the funeral had been extremely delicious. Wooow even when I write about this my mouth is watering. I cannot wait for someone else from this family to die! He he he!

4 comments:

sid fernando said...

When he dies, let me know...i'll fly in for the meal! But, regarding your other post on SLABS, i know what you mean and insist on staying at the Galle Face so my US wife can have her vegan food and I the stringhoppers while the 2 boys experiment...but know this...my wife does NOT piss in front of anyone, and ONLY behind closed doors!
Enjoyed the posts.

cj said...

Sid believe me not this was a Sri Lankan from Abroad who did this not a complete foreigner

sid fernando said...

CJ, that's even somehow worse!

btw, i agree with you that eating manioc and pork on a mat as dee described sounded incredible.

Scrumps said...

Harsh! I guess you have to take your treats where you can! :)