She brought some very interesting spices with her that are very important and prominent in Indian and Sir Lankan cooking. Apart from chilli (obviously!) there were a few others:
So from left to right we have the little block that is called asafoetida or hing which is a gum for vegetable dishes, then the light brown thing is tamarind, the black bits are called gambogé and used for fish dishes and finally the leaves about are a spice as well which is acutally quite popular in Australia apparently. There they wrap up meat in it and put it on the barbeque.
Priya Wickramasinghe had such a wonderful personality and was open to all our questions. She is acutally a self-taught chef but has been cooking all her life and published a few cook books. One of the recipes we got to taste was Isso Kari - a prawn curry:
So full of all those beautiful spices. I really felt like I learnt so much about Indian and Sri Lankan cooking in just a few hours. Amazing!
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