A Dessert That Kept Me Alive

ডিমের জর্দা
Dimer Jorda

Dimer jorda, or halua

This is basically how I liked my eggs done as a child. Not that my family would let me have this regularly - with good reason - just look at how much sugar the recipe calls for! But deemer jorda (or deemer halua to some) is very easy to cook, and my mom or aunts would often rustle some up when they needed a quick, fuss-free dessert. During my university years, the cheap and common ingredients meant it often featured in my diet. A healthier home cooked substitute to store bought desserts, or so I told myself.

Nowadays I'm a little more restrained, and I see dimer jorda as an occasional indulgence. The easiness of the dish makes it a great go-to for when I've just cooked a large meal for guests, and need a little less stress with dessert. During our various lockdowns, I found myself eating it on occasion to give myself a reason to live break up the monotony of store bought treats - though before the pandemic I never would have imagined tiring of chocolate and ice cream.

The dish is meant to look a little like yellow rice - and so it's important to watch the egg cook and break it up at the right time. Do this wrong and you end up with a pan full of sweet scrambled eggs. And of course, while I've talked about dimer jorda as dessert, it's often also served as a tea-time snack. The recipe below serves 4. 

Ingredients:

• 4.00 eggs
• 125.00 g white sugar
• 125.00 ml evaporated milk or 250.00 ml whole milk
• 2.00 tablespoons of butter or ghee
• 1.00 "capful" vanilla essence, or to taste
• 2.00 cardamom pods
• 1.00 "capful" kewra water, or to taste, optional
• 2.00 cm of cinnamon, optional

Method:

• Leave the butter or ghee to soften at room temperature
• If using whole milk, begin by reducing this to half in a non-stick saucepan on medium heat. Stir frequently to ensure it doesn't stick or burn. Once done, leave to cool
• Beat the eggs and sugar lightly with a fork until mixed, making sure there are no remaining clumps of egg white
• Follow up by pouring in the cooled reduced whole milk or evaporated milk, and again mix to incorporate
• Put a frying pan on medium low heat, adding the butter or ghee. Once warm, add the cardamom and (if using) cinnamon - then continue frying for a couple of minutes  
• Transfer egg, sugar and milk mixture to the frying pan
• Mix everything together, and let cook on low heat, stirring continuously
• Add the vanilla (and kewra water, if using) at the 5 minute mark, and continue cooking
• After 10 minutes the mixture should start solidify into loose, slimy clumps - break these up by stirring, and ensuring the clumps look like approximations of rice grains
• Cook until all of the jorda clumps into something that looks like mushy rice - this can take up to another 20-30 minutes
• Cooking times will vary based on the size of the saucepan - a larger, wider dish will let the jorda cook faster
• Once done, transfer out of the saucepan immediately to halt the cooking process
• Serve as a snack during tea or as a dessert, garnish with raisins and crushed pistachios

Additional Info
Dim (or should it be deem??) is the Bengali word for egg, and there are countless variations of this recipe, often called dimer "halua" rather than "jorda", based on national and regional variations. People have numerous methods of manipulating the texture, from the use of breadcrumbs to the addition of powdered milk, or adding food colouring to make the dish pop. I've kept this recipe very simple, but do look around for other versions to find what you personally prefer.

New Year's Eve Snacking

ডালের বড়া 

Daaler Bora or Lentil Fritters

My batch of NYE daal bora, all plated up for us to devour

Happy New Year everyone! To kick-off 2018, I'm posting a very traditional recipe for daaler bora, or lentil fritters. 

The daaler bora is very different from the other fritters I've written about for the blog. First of all, it has no flour - gram or otherwise - and the daal or lentil is what goes straight into the hot oil. Secondly, making a batch of them is a bit of a challenge: the lentils need planned pre-soaking, followed by blending and careful frying to avoid disintegration. Oddly enough, in generations past they were considered an easy enough snack to whip up. I assume this is because households would have lentils soaking anyway as part of their daily routine, and making daaler bora would just involve swiping some from that stash. Things have changed nowadays though, and in our family the daaler bora is usually bought from neighbourhood eateries - at least when we're in Bangladesh. It's much less frequently made at home, and usually only for special occasions like Ramadan, when it's an iftaar staple. In general, the daaler bora is a tea-time snack, though it can also be eaten as a side during a larger meal. The fritters are also the first phase of another dish called the doi bora, though I'm not a big fan.

The ingredients used vary from family to family, and change between Bangladesh and the rest of South Asia, as well as between Hindu and Muslim families. My family recipe is quite basic, using only one type of lentil, salt, chilli, turmeric and onion. Other families may use a mix of different lentils, and also add spices and herbs to liven things up. In the recipe below I've added coriander, but otherwise I've kept things pretty simple. I've also snuck in a bit of baking powder, something one of our chefs taught me to do, as it makes the boras stay crunchier for longer. This is really useful if you want to make them a little ahead, as I was doing to take to a New Year's party an hour away. Boras like these are usually served with dips and sauces. I served my most recent batch with sriracha, but tamarind-based sauces or ketchup are the more common accompaniment. The recipe below makes about 24 boras, each about 3.00 centimetres across. 

Sweets From Meherpur

গুড়ের সন্দেশ
Goorer Shondesh

Goorer shondesh - baked and slightly caramelised on top

Shondesh has been such a staple in my life. During my childhood in Dhaka, Nani would provide a steady supply from her favourite sweet shop in Meherpur, couriered over on a semi-regular basis. If it wasn't her, it would be my dad or uncle bringing some back from their trips to the countryside. Unfailingly, each would point out that shondesh made in their hometown was the best. Shondesh keeps well in the fridge, so even after a week we'd be digging some out to have with tea. As a voracious and indiscriminate eater, shondesh was just another sweet I stuffed myself with, but I do remember it being a favourite of my brother's - the picky eater in the family. 

Shondesh comes in a few different forms, but basically it's yet another curd-based Bangladeshi dessert. If you're unfamiliar, imagine something a little like halwa, but softer and creamier. Making it involves sweetening and cooking curd on the hub, an easier process than cooking roshogolla or golap jaam. There are slight variations: you can sweeten the curd using sugar or goor, and you can opt to use spices or not. I prefer a version very lightly spiced with cardamom and sweetened with goor. The bones of this recipe comes from a friend's mom, who recommended that I just mix all the ingredients together before popping them into the oven. She served me a version of this one Eid, and I loved it, so I've now adopted her recipe. 

The egg listed in the ingredients below is very non-traditional - the result of her experimentation with texture and consistency. I've kept it in because I quite like the resulting squidginess. Baking gives the top of the shondesh a slight caramelisation, in case you're into that kind of thing (I am). Make this in the right dish and you can serve it as is, rather than chopping it up into smaller pieces (which is traditional). Shondesh can be eaten as a dessert after a larger meal, but more usually in my family it was reserved for tea time snacking. 

Breakfast during Mango Season

আম দিয়ে দুধ-ভাত
Rice with mango-milk

Rice and mango-milk, topped with mango
What's not to like? :) 

It's mango season! In Bangladesh this means a glut of mangoes everywhere. Their sheer number has people scrambling to find ways to use them up. On top of cooking, pickling and drying, making mango-milk is another common way we at the fruit growing up. We mixed the pulped flesh of a sweet, ripe mango into hot milk, creating a warm alternative to the mango lassi. Sometimes, we would pour this onto rice - the result of a family habit of pouring any kind of milk onto rice. In fact, whenever we didn't like the food on offer for a particular meal, rice with milk was the go-to substitute dish for the kids in my generation. 

Of course, unconventional meal replacements aside, this dish makes a great breakfast. I also have it for seheri (the pre-fasting meal during Ramadan), as it makes a nice change from cereal. Folks who've had Thai mango with sticky rice will be familiar with the flavour and textures. To make this, you want mangoes that almost melt when crushed, rather than those with firm, springy flesh. In the UK, safe bets are South Asian mangoes sold as Alphonso or Kesar. When fresh mangoes aren't in season, tinned mangoes are another option. The recipe below makes a full "meal" for one, or serves two to three as a snack.

Ingredients:

• 1.00 small South Asian mango (around 175.00g whole, unpeeled)
• 150.00 g cooked rice
• 100.00 ml whole milk
• Sugar, to taste

Method:

• Heat the milk in the microwave for a minute
• While the milk is heating, peel and slice the mango
• Crush the flesh to form a pulp, and remove any overly large pieces of fibre 
• Mix the mango into the milk, and taste for sweetness. Add sugar if desired
• Place the cooked rice in a bowl. Pour in the mango-milk and mix
• Serve while warm

Additional Info

If you want something a bit richer, heat and thicken the milk on the hob before adding the mango. For a different flavour, swap the mango for banana, something we would also do quite commonly in our family. 

Completing the Classic Sweetmeat Trio

গোলাপ জাম 

Golap Jaam

Golap jaam in rose and cardamom syrup,
served with crushed pistachio

This post about golap jaam (and by extension kalo jaam) feels like a big milestone. Being able to cook these sweets, along with roshogolla, completes an important trio of Bengali sweetmeats that I grew up with. Roshogolla, golap jaam and kalo jaam were the safe, go-to desserts in our family, bought en masse for special occasions, celebrations and the traditionally Asian practice of delivering sweets with good news. They are rarely cooked at home in Bangladesh. All three are milk-based, but while roshogolla is traditionally made from boiled cheese curd, golap and kalo jaam are made from deep-fried milk solids. The difference between golap and kalo jaam is the sugar added to kalo jaam, which creates a dark, caramelised outer layer during the frying process. Some sweet shops even add purple food colouring to their kalo jaam, making it look more like the fruit it is named after. This recipe is obviously not all that traditional, constrained by ingredient availability and practicality outside Bangladesh. It grew from a mishmash of recipes collected by word of mouth, with ingredient amounts cross-referenced from various sources online. As such, I don’t really want to claim it as mine. I do, however, want to highlight a few things I learned from cooking these sweets multiple times. First, to address the various horror stories of disintegrated dumplings or sweets with uncooked centres: I think these are more the result of our habits – not writing down recipes and estimating ingredients! If you’re a beginner, then yes, these sweets will be a challenge. But if you’re a fairly regular cook, used to forming dough and deep frying, there’s not much to worry about here. The “dough” from the recipe below doesn’t disintegrate easily, even with slight cracks, as long as you add enough milk to hold it together. 

Kalo jaam in syrup
Some of these were overcooked, some were burnt
Hard to tell them apart in my opinion

Also, make sure you have enough oil for the dough balls to properly float in; otherwise they will burn at the bottom where they touch your pan. While making golap jaam, you can quite comfortably cook the sweets on medium-low heat for some time without any burning. And if do you start to burn them, it’ll be obvious from the blackening on the dough – immediately take the pan off the heat and scoop out the sweets.  And if you undercook them, leaving a hard, uncooked lump in the middle, boiling and soaking the sweets in syrup will usually soften your centre. It only gets difficult, in my opinion, with the kalo jaam: it’s hard to tell while frying whether the dark (almost black) sweets are the result of sugar caramelising or actual burning. I’ve found no way around this, apart from making sure I have plenty of light directed towards my stovetop! My second note is on ingredients (the below amounts make approximately 20 sweets). I haven’t specified the fat content of the milk in the recipe, largely because I have obtained similar results whether I opted for whole or semi-skimmed. I like to think this is because the fat content is mostly provided by the double cream. Despite the very non-traditional approach here, the end result feels surprisingly authentic (a dangerous word!). Of course, the sweets will be lacking the earthy flavours of ghee made on a kindling stove, and the rich flavours of raw, unrefined sugar – fortunately the rose and cardamom will go a long way in masking those “deficiencies”. And with that, I feel like my Bangladeshi dessert repertoire has grown a strong backbone. Time to move onto shandesh! 

A Bangladeshi Breakfast, Part 2

মোঘলাই পরোটা
Mughlai Porota 

Mughlai porota with an egg, red chilli & spring onion
filling, with a Sriracha dip on the side

I've been contemplating pancakes, mango milk and stick toffee pudding recently. However, my last two recipe posts were sweets too, and hence this savoury interlude. The Bangladeshi iteration of mughlai porota, for those who don't know, is a fried flatbread filled with egg or mincemeat. These porotas are commonly sold from road side shops in Dhaka. In my grandma's family, they feature heavily in our rotating menu of tea-time street food snacks. My mom also served them for breakfast when I was younger, in a bid to get me to eat eggs. I personally prefer these porotas for breakfast rather than tea, especially when I want something heavier as part of a brunch menu. Eggs are always a morning thing for me. 

The mincemeat version of the mughlai porota has been much less common in my life. My family rarely made it, and it's not often sold in our Dhaka neighbourhood due to the prohibitive price of meat. I've never personally made it either, and the recipe below is purely for the egg version of mughlai porota. I've also recommended shallow as opposed to deep-frying the porota. This is mostly because I can't imagine deep-frying foods I regularly eat. Do note it makes a difference - deep-fried mughlai porota comes out flakier and fluffier, and so deep-fry if you wish. Reading back over the instructions, I realise how complicated the rolling and folding may seem to a first-timer, so I'll be updating this post with more photos as soon as possible. 

No-Churn Ice Cream

নারিকেল ও লেবুর আইস ক্রিম
Lime & Coconut Ice Cream

Small servings - it is condensed milk & cream after all! 

I'm not sure why I made this ice cream. I felt I wasn't experimenting enough with my own recipes - and I guess this is the result. The methodology is adapted from a BBC Food no-churn ice cream recipe, which I've tried and tested before. The original is simply a combination of 400.00 g of condensed milk and 600.00 ml of whipped double cream, with other ingredients added to create various flavours. This makes a whopping 1 litre of ice cream, so I usually halve the recipe totals, which can be seen from the ingredients list below. 

This particular recipe is a slight modification, replacing half of the proscribed double cream with creamed coconut. This introduces the coconut flavour, as well as adding texture to the ice cream from the solid kernels. I'm quite happy with how this turned out, but note that the coconut flavour outshines the lime. Experiment by reducing the amount of creamed coconut, or by adding more lime zest. For a more intense lime flavouring, I would recommend opting for lime essence, as adding too much juice will turn the ice cream sour. Of course, there's no need to limit flavours to lime and coconut!

Ingredients:

• 200.00 g sweetened condensed milk
• 150.00 ml double cream
• 75.00 g creamed coconut
• Juice from 1 lime
• Zest from 2 limes

Method:

All mixed and prepped for freezing

• Mix the zest and lemon into the condensed milk
• Dissolve the creamed coconut into 75.00 ml of boiling water, and let cool slightly
• While the coconut is cooling, whip the double cream into stiff peaks
• Fold the coconut and then the cream into the condensed milk
• Pour into a freezer proof container, and freeze overnight
• Take out a few minutes before serving for ease of scooping

Coconut & lime ice cream, ready to serve

Additional information:

I used a solid "creamed coconut" dissolved in water as that was what was available in the supermarket near me. 150.00 ml of liquid coconut milk may be a suitable substitute, though using the creamed coconut adds a certain texture from the solids. For other flavours, I would recommend combining fruit pulps, compotes etc. with double cream and condensed milk. I've also wondered whether melting chocolate into the cream and condensed milk mixture will work, though I haven't tried it as I'm not a fan of chocolate ice cream. 

A Childhood Love Affair

চিনির পায়েস
Payesh with Sugar

Payesh - the simple way

My love for payesh started at an early age. My family and friends soon found out about my infatuation, and suddenly at the slightest hint of a special occasion people were feeding me bowlfuls of payesh. And like any relationship that faces too much outside input, my affection for payesh came to an oversaturated end. I quietly moved on to laccha shemai, and kept my newfound love to myself. However, I couldn't quite forget payesh. There is a certain richness to payesh made with jaggery that isn't quite replicated by any other dessert, and so I made sure to learn how to cook this myself. 

Payesh is a dish traditionally served during special occasions and religious festivals, and has many variations. Of course, the jaggery needed for my favourite iteration is hard to come by in the UK, so the recipe I'm posting just uses sugar. Payesh with sugar is in fact what we mostly had growing up abroad, and what our family would serve during special occasions or dinner parties. For my recipe below I use unrefined sugar and powdered cinnamon to give the dish a slight caramel tint. If I manage to hunt down some jaggery from a store near me, I will make sure to update the recipe with new instructions. The ingredients below should yield enough payesh to make modest portions for 4.

Ingredients

• 500.00 ml whole milk
• 100.00 ml water
• 60.00 g basmati rice
• 1.00 small knob of butter
• 3.00 cardamoms
• 3.00 pinches of powdered cinnamon
• 60.00 g of unrefined sugar, or to taste
• Pistachios and raisins, optional for garnish

Method

• Pour the milk and water into a heavy bottomed (ideally non-stick) pan, and put on medium-low heat
• Bring the milk to a gentle boil, which should take 10 to 15 minutes. Stir frequently to prevent a skin forming over the liquid
• Gently crush the cardamoms, and add to the milk along with the cinnamon 
• Bring the milk to rolling boil, and let it cook and thicken with the spices for around 5 minutes. Continue stirring throughout
• Rub the butter into the rice, and add to the boiling spiced milk
• Let the rice cook in the milk, which should take 15 to 20 minutes. Stir frequently while the rice cooks - this will stop the formation of a skin over the milk as well as prevent it from burning
• Once the rice is cooked, add the sugar and mix into the payesh
• Continue cooking until the dish reaches the desired consistency - runny or thick and stiff - my personal preference seems to change with the wind
• Pour into a large serving bowl or individual dessert bowls while still hot, so the payesh can set as it cools down
• If desired, garnish with chopped pistachios and raisins before serving. The dish can be had warm or cold. I would serve cold as a dessert or for afternoon tea, and warm for a special occasion breakfast.  

Additional Notes

The recipe above is payesh in its simplest form. As I've written earlier, I actually prefer payesh made with jaggery, and will hopefully posting a recipe for such soon. But the dish can get much more interesting. Payesh holds a special significance for Hindu Bangladeshis, and I've seen their recipes use more complex spice combinations - think bay leaves and saffron. In rural Bangladesh, I've also encountered versions of the dish that substitute rice for wheat, papaya or coconut. 

Winter Desserts

লাচ্চা সেমাই
Laccha Shemai

Laccha shemai served with raisins. Well, a raisin - the rest sunk!

Despite being such a small country, Bangladesh seems to be home to a unending variety of food. Every time I've moved back home or just dropped by for a visit, I've discovered something new to take back with me and attempt to recreate. Laccha shemai is one such dish, which I first came across while at school in Dhaka during the early 2000s. I'd grown up on another form of the dessert - dudh (or milk) shemai - but I'd never been a big fan. For those of you unfamiliar with the dish, shemai is a form of dried or fried vermicelli, and may be tricky to get your hands on unless you live near an Asian supermarket.

Shemai or fried vermicelli, as seen pre-soaking

However, if you do manage to procure some cooking laccha shemai is the most simple thing. The recipe below essentially calls for boiling some milk, sugar and spices before soaking in the shemai and serving the dish warm. It's the perfect dessert for a cold winter, and its traditionally eaten during this season in my family. It's a casual dessert, served after dinner on a normal day. On the odd occasion its eaten separately as a snack or during tea, but that might just be me. I prefer laccha shemai to dudh shemai as it doesn't call for boiling the vermicelli along with the milk, leaving the strands with a chewy "al dente" quality. This in my opinion makes for a more interesting texture than the mush you're often left with for dudh shemai, but it does mean laccha shemai has to be consumed almost immediately after its prepared.  

Secret Ingredients

শাশলিক 

Chicken Shashlik

Chicken shashlik at a family dinner, courtesy of mom

Have you ever tasted a really great dish somewhere, perhaps when you've been over for dinner at a friend's? Have you then gone on to ask for the recipe, only to fail at recreating the dish again exactly? Apparently this happens because people withhold key steps in the method, or fail to mention certain secret ingredients. 

Thankfully getting recipes from (mostly) family has meant that I haven't had to face this! But hearing my mom say she uses mustard powder and oyster sauce for her Bangladeshi style chicken shashlik reminded me of those stories. They're not the most obvious ingredients I would think of if I was trying to create a shashlik recipe myself. Not that I can claim these are secret ingredients anymore, but hey, to me food is all about sharing. These are the chicken shashlik I've grown up with, now up online for anyone else to try and recreate. I recently made this for a party at mine, and ingredient amounts are now updated accordingly. 

The End of Ramadan

কাঁচা ছোলা

Raw Chickpeas

Raw chickpeas as part of a healthy iftaar with various fruit.
And one unhealthy cauliflower fritter.

Raw chickpeas form an essential part of the healthy iftaar in my family, especially on my mom's side. We have heaps of this stuff alongside fruit and salad while minimising our consumption of deep fried vegetable fritters and cooked chickpeas. They're a great source of protein. In fact, in the past they weren't a Ramadan-only staple - members of the local bodybuilding club near my grandma's house used these as a diet supplement. 

Peeling them for consumption can be quite time consuming, and I remember our aunts often set us - the cousins - the job of sitting down and preparing them before many iftaars. Working communally sped things up considerably so consider applying the same strategy if you can!

Ingredients:

• 100.00g of raw chickpeas
• 1.00 teaspoon of sliced ginger
• Lemon juice from 2 wedges of lemon
• Salt, to taste

Method:

• Soak the chickpeas overnight
• Once soaked, they should grow and become easier to peel. Peel and discard the shells (this will take time and patience!)
• Mix the chickpeas, ginger, lemon juice and salt together
• Either serve immediately, or refrigerate for an hour and serve cold

Additional Information:

Potentially something to add to a fresh, zingy salad.

Another Fry Up!

বেগুনি, পিয়াজু, সবজি বরা ও ইত্যাদি

Vegetable Fritters

Spinach fritters, boxed up and ready to go.

Apologies for being away so long. If you know me personally or through Instagram you'll know that I have still been eating so it may seem inexcusable that I haven't been posting. But this is actually the first uninterrupted week I've been able to spend at home in about two months. In fact, my last post was blogged on the go from my hard drive. But the travelling should be at an end now, and (Britain's excuse for) summer is finally here.

Hopefully for me that'll mean a few days of rest and a few days of good weather. Ramadan is also coming up, so I thought I'd share the recipe for something that we often eat during this time: vegetable fritters. Of course, their consumption isn't limited to Ramadan iftaars. In my grandma's house, they'll often make an appearance at tea or as a snack when we have guests over. On the odd occasion, as leftovers they'll function as a side dish as well.

They're incredibly versatile in the sense that you can pretty much throw any soft vegetable you have in the fridge into some batter and start frying - a very easy snack or appetiser to a multi-course meal. They'll also help contribute to your 5 (7, 9, 11?) a day, but maybe that benefit is nullified by the frying!

Fish: A Journey of Acceptance

টুনা ফিশের চপ
Bangladeshi Fish Cakes

As usual, I erred on the side of over frying/cooking/burning

I'm a meat person. That should be obvious from the recipes on this blog, and the lack of fish recipes in particular. Growing up, I used to hate anything fish unless it was squidgy seafood. These fish cakes would be the one form in which I would consume fish - much to my parents' chagrin as they tried to push me towards a balanced diet. That dislike for fish is (mostly) gone now, but I still don't cook fish often enough at home. Even this recipe I only use on special occasions - i.e. when I have people round for dinner. I've found myself scrambling to throw in fish cakes to balance out very meat heavy menus more than once.

The recipe below is very simple. It essentially requires minimal amount of prep before all of the ingredients are mixed together before shallow-frying. But on the flip side, don't underestimate how long it can take to shape 20 fish cakes. I have spent more time than I would like splattered with oil in my kitchen, trying to fry these before my guests wonder where their food/host is!

The White Weekend Continues

Dips

There was just enough dip left for a picture!

It's still snowing in London and more parties that I was meant to go to have been cancelled, so here I am with another food post today. I'm just putting up the recipes for two very simple dips from mom that I suspect are tzatziki inspired. Only approximate amounts - this is all down to your own personal tastes.

A Traditional Bangladeshi Kabab

গরুর মাংসের কাবাব

Beef Kabab

The moment where your food is turning out just the way it should :)

I tried to have my house warming (finally!) yesterday night, but the snow conspired against me and we ended up with half the number of people we were expecting. I had still cooked though, so I thought I may was well post recipes for some of the evening's menu. My first post is the traditional Bangladeshi beef kabab, which is hugely versatile because it can be served as a main, side or snack depending on how it's sized and accompanied. I'm afraid I have no photos of the finished kababs to put up, people were already over and I forgot to take any in the mad rush of getting the food ready.

Update (03/06/2016):
I've re-written the instructions below to include some new ingredients, notably the traditional mint that I mention in the Additional Info section. I've also included notes on how to cook this in the oven, and avoid the laborious pan frying. A word of warning though - oven cooking gives this a bouncy kofta-like texture, as opposed to the cakey, meaty mouthfeel of a traditional kabab. 

Really A Suggestion Rather Than A Recipe

Sweet and Spicy Pineapple

Sweet and spicy pineapple with chilli powder

I love pineapple. I'm actually trying to decide if it's my favourite fruit, but it's competing with mango in my mind right now. Anyway, I love pineapple in many forms, and one of these forms is the dried pineapple sprinkled with sugar and chilli I used to have in Thailand. Unfortunately, this isn't something I've been able to find in Birmingham so I've tried recreating something similar using fresh pineapple. The results have been satisfying enough for me, so I thought I'd do a post on it.