This is what our normal dinners look like (with the addition of a big bowl of rice).
Most things are generally familiar, especially if you have been to any Indian restaurants, although the flavors are unique.Dal (usually lentils, but can also be any kind of pea or bean) in the Bangladeshi style is a lentil soup with garlic, chili peppers, and onions cooked until the lentils get mashed up and breakdown and make the whole mixture a consistency of thin gravy. Some Bangladeshis eat this as a soup at the end of the meal, but others mix it in with their rice as they eat the other dishes.
So, what is curry, exactly? Well, it isn't much like the curry mixes you pick up in the grocery stores back in the US. You'll get something much closer if you walk into an Indian restaurant and order Chicken Tikka Masala and Vegetable Do Piaza (if you are in a big city, you might even be able to find a Bengali restaurant). Those restaurant dishes will be somewhat compromised for American tastes (more so if it is a buffet), but it is a good place to start.
To start whipping a curry dish up yourself, you would do something like this (hopefully following a real recipe you find in a book or on the internet):
[1] put some oil in a pan over medium heat (mustard oil is commonly used here, but also regular vegetable oils or ghee, which is clarified butter) along with the whole spices of cinnamon, cloves, green cardamom pods, black peppercorns, and bay leaf, cooking until the spices are just toasted;
[2] add a paste made of blended up garlic, onion, and ginger and cook until this starts to just brown;
[3] add several green chili peppers (to taste, but they tend to use a lot) that look a lot like serrano peppers or ground red pepper, and tumeric;
[4] add vegetables, or meat, or chicken, or fish depending on what you are making and cover cooking over low heat for all the flavors to blend together.
[5] then serve with lots of long grain basmati rice.
Usually our vegetables include potatoes and green beans and eggplant (and chili peppers), with additions of whatever else happens to be in season. So far, we've seen carrots, tomatoes, pumpkin-like squash, and lots of unique squash/eggplant-like vegetables that we haven't been familiar with. Some of them have been good but unremarkable, while others have been good enough we wish we could take them back to the US with us when we return.
Otherwise, we eat a lot of fish (as is traditional in Bangladesh) usually cut into steak like portions and served with some curried squash. We are just starting to be able to tell the fish apart by their flavors and amount of bones, but they have mostly been delicious. Some Indian restaurants will have Bengal-style fish dishes.
So, that's it. Hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for coming over.
If you want to try the real stuff, just let us know when you'll be dropping by.
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