Food Part 1: Lunch

I am currently renting a room in an apartment owned by my language school and classes are held in the apartment above. In addition to living in a pretty posh apartment in Dhaka, I also have a wonderful cook named Golap (a fairly common male name, which means rose). Everyday I finish language class at 1pm and come downstairs to my apartment where an amazing Bangladeshi feast awaits me. No matter what, it’s not lunch without dal-bhat (lentils and rice). This seems to be the most common food country-wide however dal can vary quite a bit, but after two months, I have yet to find any dal that beats Golap’s. In addition to dal-bhat, we usually also have some kind of sobji (vegetable curry), ruti (flat bread), and alu (potatoes). Sometimes we will have pollau, which is rice cooked in spices and oil with vegatables and traditionally meat. However, my all time favorite lunch dish is dim buna (a boiled egg in a spicy curry sauce).

Clockwise: vegetables, potatoe, ruti, dal and rice.

Pollau (yellow colored rice above) and dim buna (boiled egg in curry sauce).

Overall, Bengali food is deliscous (and very different from Indian food). None of the flavors are too overpowering, and the food it not too heavy and not too rich. Bangladeshi food is actually not that spicy. Golap will use a lot of holud or tumeric (which in Bangla actually means yellow and at the end of the meal my fingertips are temporarily stained yellow), cumin, garlic, ginger, and cinnamon (for meat). The main spice that does make Bengali food spicy is kacha morich, which is a small green chili pepper.

I usually will eat my lunch deshi style, sans fork, spoon, knife, and instead use my fingertips to mix together different tasty bites.  Some say it tastes better when you use your hands, and sometimes I think this is true, but mostly for me I just think its kind of fun (and I need practice for when I eat at family’s homes).  Eating with my hands is not as easy as it looks, and actually as creepy as it sounds, I sometimes watch people to see how they eat in order to get some tips. As far as I can tell, it does not seem like there is one standard way of eating, other than using your fingertips. Some people fold in vegetables into their rice and form it into a small ball before neatly eating it, whereas others seem to just gracefully grab a small portion from their plate. After I neatly place each item on my plate, within seconds I end up with one jumbled pile of food (I have yet to seen a Bangladeshi do this). Luckily, all of the flavors go together and it still tastes delicious! Needless to say, it takes practice.

After two and a half months of eating some variation of this for lunch and dinner everyday, I have yet to get tired of it (if your wondering about breakfast, I usually just have toasted white bread, an egg or yogurt, and of course, nescafe); and on that note, it’s time for dal-bhat round two for today.