While there are plenty of books on Sri Lankan cookery, few of them are dedicated to vegetarian and vegan dishes. Many dishes are time-consuming to make and use ingredients that are not easy to get hold of, if you live outside of London, or other major cities in Europe.
 
What we have tried to do here is provide a range of Sri Lankan recipes that are vegetarian, and easy to cook using ingredients that are readily available. In many cases they have been adapted from the original, so we do not make any claims to them being authentic. But nearly all of them are inspired by Sri Lankan flavours and are guaranteed to tickle your taste buds.
 
Jane was an accomplished cook when we got married back in 1982. She had an excellent repertoire of traditional European dishes that had been adapted for a vegetarian diet. However, other than a typical curry of that period, which included apples and raisins, she had not experienced any Sri Lankan food.
 
Learning to cook Sri Lankan food was not easy, when you had not sampled the dish that you are trying to recreate. Often, she depended on my judgement as to whether the dish tasted right or not. My mum, an equally excellent cook of Sri Lankan food, was of great help. Her recipes however were not easy to capture, as she tended to do a lot by feel, and was quite vague about quantities.  
 
It has been a long journey, with help from family and a range of cookbooks. Living in York, getting hold of some key ingredients such as curry leaves, jaggery and Jaffna curry powder was a challenge. Despite this, Jane has managed to cook a range of Sri Lankan dishes and put together meals that would be the envy of many.