a veritable feast

The other day, our coworker Aliza brought lunch for everyone. And what a lunch it was! An absolutely delicious feast.

This may give you a good idea of just how much food there was! We had something in practically every food group.

Let's start with the giant prawns in a delicious onion/garlic/ginger paste.

These beef meatballs in an onion curry were absolutely mouth-watering. Aliza says that she boiled the beef before blending it, adding some spices and bread crumbs and frying them up. Then she added them to the curry.

Even boiled eggs weren't simple. They were basted in a light curry.

The chicken curry: perhaps my absolute favorite. It tasted like the home cooked food I grew up with! Absolutely perfect in the thick spicy curry.

Mixed vegetables: light and delicious.

Another absolute favorite: olive pickle. It's so simple to make, according to Aliza. She says she boiled fresh, green olives with salt, sugar, and chili powder. No mention of quantity, just eyeballing it. And it tasted amazing.

There was also a fabulous cucumber, carrot, and onion salad. Everything was served with a lot of rice. Needless to say, it was a most satisfying meal.

Some "last minute meals" - Beets, Omlettes, Perfection

Who says fast food has to be the high-sodium, greasy, and bland type? After our long days of teaching in the classroom, and grading/planning at the office, we do come home tired, but rarely completely uninspired when it comes to food. In fact, the times when I'm ineffective in my lesson planning is usually because I'm imagining the next meal's menu... or waiting for the delivery boys to bring our cheap Bangladeshi curries from "TMT Daily Needs" to the office.

The other night I had a hankering for beets. Not the pickled kind, but good, fresh, bleeding-purple beets. Last year, I discovered the deliciously magenta combination of roasted beets with arugula, goat cheese, and caramelized onion on a toasted sandwich.

Well... here in Chittagong goat cheese and argulula are not your average corner-market ingredients, so this throw-together meal needed some improvisation. Our chefs here on the 9th floor had made a monstrous batch of gorgeous hummus (to be blogged about soon) last weekend, so it's soft texture and lime-tang substituted for goat's cheese. Caramelized onions were doable, no problem. We threw in a side of cucumber spears to suffice for the missing leafy greens.

So the final product consisted of:

-Fresh beets, chopped in half-moons and boiled about 15 minutes.

-Caramelized onions (saute at low heat for 10 min. in butter/olive oil/dash of sugar/pinch of salt)

-Spoon of homemade hummus (recipe soon to follow)

-Brown bread

Directions: Layer the first three ingredients between two pieces of brown bread (butter the exposed side of the bread). Toast in the oven at around 300 degrees till slightly browned.

Another fall-back meal in our flat is a "deshi omlette" - perfected below by Fatema. Some chiles, garlic, tomato, salt thrown in to an omlette that's eaten over rice, and you've got a lovely balanced meal, especially if you follow it with some fresh papaya!

Some favorites

There is a lot of delicious food to be had in Chittagong. Most of the food is Bangladeshi/Indian. There are also some restaurants that serve delicious Thai and Chinese food. Last night, I went out to dinner at one of my favorite restaurants here, Dhaba. Everyone writes about Dhaba, I know. All the guidebooks for Bangladesh talk extensively on how delicious Dhaba food is. Rightfully so. It's cheap, it's so very tasty. And last night, we got to eat beef kebabs now that beef is safe to eat again (there was an anthrax scare for a while).

I had the beef boti kebab (my favorite) with plain naan, a onion/carrot salad, and some green chili sauce. It was perfect.

Today, for lunch I made one of my favorite vegetables: red spinach. It's the easiest thing to make and the most delicious.

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon of oil (your choice; I use canola)

• 1 medium or large onion, diced

• 3-4 cloves of garlic, minced

• 2-3 green chili 

• 3/4 teaspoon of salt (or to taste)

• Less than 1/4 teaspoon turmeric powder

• 1/4 teaspoon chili powder 

• 1 bundle of red spinach, washed and cut (usually makes 4-5 cups)

Directions:

1. In a pan, saute onion, garlic, and green chili in oil with the salt till soft and golden brown. 
2. Add turmeric powder and chili powder. Stir and cook for 1 or 2 minutes. Add the red spinach, cook till stems are tender. 

Serve with lemon or lime and rice.

Banana Bread!

Yesterday, we got into the discussion of banana bread. I've never liked banana bread, but Alyssa and Jamie do. My dad loves banana bread and buys it at Sam's Club every now and again. I absolutely hated the smell of it whenever he brought it home and didn't even like sitting near it. However, the idea of baking something new appealed to me. So, I baked banana bread for the first time today. And guess what? I loved it!

I used this recipe from Food Network. I replaced the all-purpose flour with brown atta, which is more readily available here. Next time, I will use less sugar, probably 2/3 cup instead of the one cup the recipe calls for. I also baked for 55 minutes instead of the full hour in the tiny electric oven we have. The fork came out clean after half an hour, but the density of the bread still felt soft. When you encounter some resistance while inserting the fork, that's when it's at the right density.

The recipe itself is very easy to make here in Bangladesh. All the ingredients can be found in any of the grocery shops. Below is the recipe copied from Food Network:

Ingredients:

• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
• 2 large eggs
• 3 ripe bananas
• 1 tablespoon milk
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt

Directions

1.  Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Butter a 9x5x3 inch loaf pan.
2. Cream the sugar and butter in a large mixing bowl until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
3. In a small bowl, mash the bananas with a fork. Mix in the milk and cinnamon. In another bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. 
4. Add the banana mixture to the creamed mixture and stir until combined. Add dry ingredients, mixing just until flour disappears.
5. Pour batter into prepared ban and bake 1 hour to 1 hour and 10 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
6. Set aside to cool on a rack for 15 minutes. Remove bread from pan, invert onto rack and cool completely before slicing.
7. Spread slices with honey or serve with ice cream.

We ate our bread with milk tea. It was marvelous.