Bangladesh - Luchi, Aloor Dum, and Soojir Halvah

Honestly, I did not think we were going to have so much trouble with cookbooks this early in! But this is week three where neither the local library or the BPL were any help to us. I suppose this is inevitable given how recently Americans started eating even westernized Indian food, but still, it's cramping our style.

Anyway, we were further complicated by a scarcity of Bangladeshi recipes online. In the end, we have decided to cheat a bit and use some Indian Bengali recipes.  This isn't a perfect solution; my limited research says that there is plenty of diversity in Bengali cuisine, plus what divergence has occurred since partition, but given the lack of proper source material, we must call it close enough to our basic purpose of eating a lot of things that are not french toast.

Menu

• Aloor Dum (Spicy Potato Curry) - We cut these into smaller cubes as I was Ready To Eat before we even started cooking.  This got them cooked in about twenty minutes as we were preparing the other two dishes.  I think we used too much potato for the spices called for, but all in all very good and rather different from our breakfast potatoes last week.
• Luchi (Deep-fried Flatbread) - My husband is becoming an expert in fry breads. :)  They do not look as pretty and white as they are supposed to; this is because we are still too scared to deep-fry our bread for breakfast!  But shallow-fried they are still rich and flaky.
• Soojir Halvah (Semolina Pudding) - This was definitely the star of the show!  I could eat this every day.  Very easy to put together too.  I used one cup of water where the recipe did not specify and it turned out beautifully.  I should like to try these with cranberries and pecans in the fall.

Today's recipes are by Jayashree Mandal of Spice and Curry, who we sincerely hope does not mind our culinary border-crossing here.  For our part, after tasting her Soojir Halvah, we have lost any frustration we had this week!