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!