food

So while I was plastering around an electrical socket, I thought to myself, “Gypsum. I wonder what gypsum is”. Gypsum, my friends, is calcium sulfate dihydrate, a naturally occurring chemical with the chemical formula CaSO₄·2H₂O.

Calcium sulfate is also “The traditional and most widely used coagulant to produce Chinese-style tofu. It produces a tofu that is tender but slightly brittle in texture.” Wikipedia claims that “the coagulant itself has no perceivable taste”, but I still appear to be eating my own house.

This makes me sad.

On the way back from Barisal, we stopped in Gaurnadi, which is apparently famous in Bangladesh for its sweets. That meant a lot more rosh ghulam, rosh malai and a bunch of other milk-based products. I particularly liked the look of the shop that we visited, where the jars of curd were lined up on the front counter.

The sweets of Gaurnadi are famous because they’re made of fresh milk, rather than the condensed milk that is used in most other places. In the back room, weathered cooks hunch over boiling pans of white gold while stone jars line the shelves behind them. It’s all about the atmosphere, really.

In the end, we bought about eight boxes of different sweets to take back to Dhaka, and I sampled five different kinds, from the milky to the crunchy to the frankly odd. The rest of the car journey I spent buzzing off a sugar rush, which was a good thing, as it was about 6 hours of fairly similar and not particularly good roads.

Let me tell you - there’s not much to do in Barisal. As the capital of one of the divisions of Bangladesh that was most affected by Cyclone Sidr, it’s suddenly become the the base of operations for a number of aid agencies. It’s a massive improvement on Dhaka - which frankly is unbearable - but it’s about as provincial as they come.

For some reason, Bangladeshis appear to feel that Chinese restaurants are the height of sophistication, even when there aren’t any Chinese people involved. The first two nights I spent in Barisal, we ended up at “Best Food Garden”, a Chinese restaurant that didn’t have a garden, and didn’t live up to the best food promise either. On the third day I discovered Hotel Bismillah, though, and suddenly dinner was a treat rather than a trial.

Nothing special - the usual Bangladeshi fare - but the place was clean, the service was quick and the food was well-cooked. I had the daal bhuna, mixed vegetable and roti, all of which were excellent, but the show-stopper was the sliced beetroot dish. I haven’t seen it anywhere else, but it was tasty, tasty, tasty; but also mysterious mysterious mysterious, because none of the waiters could tell me what it was called.

Apparently not many aid workers are eating there, because the staff were moderately entertained to see us. If you’re staying in the Hotel Athena in Barisal - which you’ll have to, because it’s the only hotel in town, but you can’t, because Save the Children have booked the entire place, Bismillah provides the food there as well. So now you know where to eat if you visit Barisal - just stay away from the Chinese restaurants.

Six years ago I had a thought. What if you came home from work (or school, or combat, or whatever) and wanted to cook yourself a hearty meal, but when you looked in the cupboard the ingredients you saw just didn’t make any sense? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a service where you dropped in your ingredients and out popped some recipe ideas? The short answer is - yes, it would be great.

Google Recipes eventually came out, which was adequate, but not really what I was looking for - it was a bit unfriendly, plus there was no sense that the people behind it cared about food at all. Fast forward to earlier this year, when I met Brys Stephens at a dinner party given by Gordon Peters in Washington DC. Brys told me about his startup project Cookthink, and it turned out that he and his partners had the same idea - the difference between us being that they’d actually done something with it.

They’ve been blogging for a while (always interesting), but Cookthink Beta launched two weeks ago and it’s great, just like I thought it would be. The only thing I thought they should add would be more of a community element - you know, sharing recipes between members - CookTube, if you will. I’m pretty sure that they’ll get around to it sooner or later, but in the interests of practicing what I preach, I’m going to start posting recipes on this blog.

Although not today.