Pickles and seenisambol straight from her garden
Nira La Brooy in her garden
Walk into Nira La Brooy’s house in Pelawatte and the first thing you will notice is the artistic design. From flower arrangements and paintings to a table made out of an old window, the entire house is bright, colourful and unusual. If you happen to chat with Nira, you will notice the same thing about her.
It is with this spirit that she has embarked upon her latest venture of selling homemade food.
A former student of Ave Maria Convent, Negombo, Nira has been decorating bridal sarees for many years. However, after her children left to go overseas, she decided to do something different – both as a means of keeping herself occupied and also to combat the loneliness she felt from their absence. With the encouragement and support she received from her friends and family, she decided to sell her homemade goods in earnest. She had sold her homemade jams previously, but this time she has launched her products under the brand name ‘Spoonful’ and included a variety of homemade goods such as pickles, seenisambol and juices.
Nira makes only a maximum of 10 bottles of her pickles or seenisambol at a time. All the produce she uses is organic and home grown, except the onions and garlic and made according to the availability of produce. She grows most of what she uses in her own home garden, including cherry tomatoes, chilli and mandarins. Some of the other ingredients are brought down from remote areas – for example, honey and tamarind from Wilpattu. A firm believer in the virtues of local produce, Nira feels that buying local is beneficial for both the consumer and the local farmers. “Although people keep saying that you should have an apple a day, if you think about how far the apples come from and how long they take to arrive in Sri Lanka, you begin to realize just how much preservatives they must be needing to keep them fresh,” she says.
Everything about the brand is eco friendly and healthy. Made with no artificial preservatives or flavours they therefore need to be refrigerated immediately, a small price to pay for organic food.
Traditional food such as garlic in bees honey and even the sweetmeats are a big part of what Nira does because she feels that the way food was prepared in the ‘good old days’ is much healthier and heartier than what is being prepared now. She can talk at length on dwindling traditions, for she feels strongly about how people simply buy the sweetmeats which used to be made lovingly at home. The old ways are usually the most effective. Nira explains that the proper way to make ‘aluva’ is with ‘puchchapukadju’ or roasted cashewnuts, instead of the raw cashewnuts which are used today. In the spirit of promoting traditional food, Nira is even willing to share her processes with her customers.
Nira’s jars of local flavours. Pix by Nilan Maligaspe
It’s clear that Nira’s new business venture is directed by her passion for cooking. ‘Cooking isn’t a major process if you have the right ingredients,’ she says, and her humble home business easily attests to this fact. Spoonful is very much about homemade food and capturing the essence of goodness that comes with such food, and who better to help you with such a homely venture than the people who live around you? When Nira comes up with a new recipe, she first asks her neighbours to try it out and tell her what they think of the product. She will then tweak according to their feedback and even get new ideas from them. According to one of her customers her garlic in bees honey tastes good with vanilla ice cream!
Every item sold by Spoonful is Rs. 550 or less. Nira caters juices for orders of 10 glasses and above. She can be contacted at 416/3, Old Batapotha Road, Pelawatte.