Bangladeshi food: 31 August-5 September 2014

Okay, I'm not going to turn into a food blogger, but I wanted to document how tasty, fresh and spectacular the food is in Bangladesh.  Here’s some of what I’ve been eating.

The western breakfast option is an omelette with chilli, sweet toast with butter and jam, slices of cucumber (they pop up at most meals) and chai marsala, or what I’d call chai at home: here “chai” is just “tea” – you can choose chai with milk, chai with lemon, or chai marsala. 

The other breakfast option has been a fried egg with dhal and fresh bread which seems to be a cross between a naan and a roti: it’s a bit oily but otherwise very tasty.  And chai, tea, or (instant) coffee.

Fried egg, bread, dhal

Main meals include rice, ‘proper’ (wholemeal) chapatti (if we’re in time – these go fast), a variety of dhal, and vegetables including bitter gourd (chopped and fried with spices; it was definitely bitter but not unpleasant) and pointed gourd (sort of like a long eggplant but with bigger seeds and less flesh.  It’s roasted and eaten whole – the seeds pop a bit when you bite them.  Very tasty!),  There are many types of fish (Bangladesh is a river delta, after all), lots of chicken (grilled or curried) and often mutton curry or stew. 

 Chapatti, carp, dhal, rice, cucumber, lime, bitter gourd

Snacks have included vegetable pakoras, small sesame and jaggery balls, larger puffed rice and jaggery balls, lots of fruit – guavas, pineapple, sweet bananas with lots of seeds about the size of cherry pits (and non seeded bananas too).  There’re sometimes packets of little biscuits which are savoury and vaguely cheese flavoured.   

Banana with many, many seeds: very tasty but hard to eat politely in company

Guava, puffed rice and jaggery balls, and local fruit

Sesame and jaggery balls...this is an even tastier source of calcium than ice cream!

Coconut water at morning tea

I'm still hanging out for proper naan – we had bread dough, which is sweet, cooked on a tandoor one evening: not at all the same K 

Dhal, spicy vegetables, raita and non-naan

Many meals finish with a dessert – sometimes fresh fruit or little cups of ice cream, but the best is curd, a caramel-flavoured dessert which everyone seems to love.  It’s milk heated with sugar, then a curdling agent/culture is added and it’s set in terracotta, in which it seems to keep well.

 Milk curd – yum!!

I don’t eat this well in Australia!