ফুলকপি ভাজি
Fried Cauliflower
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| Fried cauliflower in the bottom right corner - part of this year's Eid breakfast |
When my parents visited me in London earlier this year, they demanded and insisted on many things. One of those things was a properly cooked breakfast every morning, eschewing my suggestion of visiting a different Richmond café every day. I will admit that I made said suggestion because I didn’t want to cook everything morning - after all, the local cafés are nothing to write home about. However, my parents are stubborn and eventually my mom decided she would make simple vegetarian dishes over a couple of days, and we'd go out for the others.
I felt a bit guilty that mom was cooking while she was on holiday, and annoyed that dad was being lazy and not helping out in the kitchen. The usual row about sexism ensued and the traditional family fight followed. Queue wildly dramatic emotional blackmail and comical threats of severing ties. Once in the kitchen, mom assured me she had just wanted cook me breakfast while she was here, and reminded me she didn't usually have to do this when she was at home. And besides, the ruti was supermarket-bought anyway! Thus the morning segment of our family show ended, and I give you my mom's recipe for cauliflower below.
This is a common Bangladeshi breakfast dish, and has honestly been pretty much the same wherever I've eaten it. It's part of a suite of vegetarian dishes all cooked similarly by frying in oil, with different vegetables thrown in based on people’s tastes and the local yield. The use of cauliflower leaves so far is unique to my mom, and the addition of herbs is no doubt the influence of many years in Europe.
