nailya patar ghido, shimer bichir dal, loti chocchoori...mukhi.

Strange names to those who never heard of them, but mouth-watering delicacies for those who have the same taste buds like mine. Nailya pata ba pat path is leaves from plants grown very commonly in Bengali households. The body of the plants is used for doing Yagna ( holy fire during different puja's). Those of us who are rooted originally in Bangladesh have lots of recipes using different leaves from different plants. Nailya Patar ghido/ geero was a special recipe made by my thakurma. She used to knot a few clean leaves together ( a great task of patience). after doing several, she used to boil them in mustard paste and add dried seeds of jackfruit to that. It was just amazing and Yummy!! The mixture of bitter and tangy effect...wow.and even when those leaves are dipped in pice and turmeric paste and deep-fried it taste great with warm rice. Shimer bichir dal..difficult to take out all the seeds from each shim. and after gathering all of them ( say around half kg), grandma used to roast them and then boil them. After they are soft yet intact she used to season it with brinjal fry and ghee. Loti chocchori, mukhi..all are similarly appealing. In Bengali, there is a proverb that there is gold in the soil. But that gold is nothing, but the fact that the soil itself is so fertile that it gives wonderful crops for any seed sown inside it. Plenty of rain is anyways offered by nature.

I sometimes wonder people get Nobel prize for so many this and that..but why there are no such big awards for the discovery of great recipes with great nutritional value. If there were something like this then there would have been an award showcased for almost all Grandma's like mine. With almost no infrastructure, no equipment, no gadgets, and least ingredients they used to cook some wonderful delicacies..everything homemade and garden-fresh. Trust me, they taste even better then food from a five-star hotel worth a thousand dollars.