Adventures in Cooking

Today, June 26th, is Eid in Bangladesh -- the end of Ramadan.  It is a huge holiday here, comparable to Christmas.  People visit family, eat traditional foods, and visit neighbors and friends.  It has mostly been a quiet day for me, which I have greatly enjoyed.  Josiah went to "tea" (which is at about 10 am) with a friend and then they went to the Wild Animal Park.  The price if you are a local is 20 taka (about a quarter) but if you are a visitor make that 400 :0)

But because everyone is off from work, we had to scrounge for ourselves today.  So, I got to try and cook in the kitchen here at the guest house...all I needed to do was boil water for the soup.  That's it, boil water and the soup finally got done 2 hours later.  Why?  Well, there are quirks here.  The outlets have to be turned on for power.  You can't use the water from the tap for cooking.  And the stove tops are difficult to turn on. 

To figure out which burner I was turning on I had to hold my hand over it and even then the electric stove top never got warm enough to boil the water.  The gas range was out of propane (which sits next to it in a large can...made me kinda nervous). Once that was replaced, by someone else :0) who also showed me how to turn it on (no fan allowed because it blows out the flame), it went tolerably quickly.  And the package of tortilla soup was reasonably good -- though nothing like New Mexico's. 

Ps. This is not mine.  This is from the market across the way.