Nate and I love to cook and eat, and one of the most exciting things about moving to another country is the food! I am all about trying new foods, we’re both eager to start eating Bangladeshi cuisine.
There is at least one good Bangladeshi restaurant in Northern Virginia, and last week Nate went there for lunch with some of his classmates. I asked him to bring some food home for me, and he brought back beef curry.
I’ve had lots of curries, but this was really good. I even liked the rice!
The beef was tender, flavorful, and spicy, but not too spicy, and the rice was flavored with cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods and cloves. I don’t really like rice, and I could have eaten this rice by itself with a spoon.
Apparently the restaurant they went to (I don’t know what it’s called) is known for their shrimp curry, and if the beef curry was this good I can’t wait to try the shrimp! Nate is going there again today with his classmates and teachers to practice speaking Bangla with the waitstaff. I am so jealous.
Earlier this week I made a fish tomato curry to use up all the tomatoes from our garden, and the recipe I used was supposedly Bengali. It was loaded with fresh ginger, ground cumin and coriander, garlic, and turmeric. The curry was pretty good (not amazing), and I think it would have been better with higher quality rice. I also left out the cilantro since zero forethought went into the recipe and I used what I already had in the kitchen, which is currently cilantro-less. Typically I would include a photo of the finished product, but it was an unattractive red blob in a bowl so I didn’t even take a picture.
I’m hoping Nate will bring back some leftovers from his lunch today for me to try, but he can really pack it in, so that’s unlikely.
In other news, Nate’s language class is seriously moving right along. I am really impressed with how much they have already learned! They’re working on reading and talking about the U.S., and it’s hard to believe this is only the third week of class. It’s interesting listening to him practice speaking because I truly have no idea what he’s saying, when it comes to things other than “hello” and “my name is…” With a lot of other languages, bits and pieces can be gleaned from languages I already know, or at least I can recognize the alphabet, but not with Bangla. It sounds like complete gibberish.
According to Athena 