Cooking Class with the Head Chef at Heritance Kandalama Hotel

Here's the crab curry just before serving.Yum.
Pic by Ian Caldwell

The Heritance Kandalama in Dambulla is one of the best hotels in Sri Lanka. We decided to organise a cooking demonstration with the chef - and as it turned out, he was actually the head chef, working with 75 other cooks at the hotel.
Not a bad job for Sri Lankan-born Canberra resident chef, Prasanta.

Some of the ingredients for the crab curry: it had a lot of black pepper in it, so the resulting flavour is both salty and very peppery, while not being too (chilli) hot...

Ian, Lucie, Juliet, Sue and Tikwis, plates ready, await the delivery of an incredibly tasty crab curry. It was so good, and so messy cracking into the shells, I totally forgot to take a photo!

In goes more coconut milk

Head chef, Prasanta, keeps an eye on his chef's performance...