Familiarity

So pretty soon we will be hitting our one year anniversary in Bangladesh! Unbelievable. We also just passed our one year anniversary for our blog- thanks to everyone still reading !

So, we’ll naturally have an anniversary post on our REAL anniversary, but being here for almost a year has put an interesting lens on our experience. On one hand, things seem so much more familiar and we’ve really settled into our life here. On the other hand, some things are just as difficult as ever. After almost a year, we’ve adapted to the food availability (and non-availability) for the most part. We have actually really enjoyed adjusting our diets to the local markets, and we’re too poor (and cheap) to buy a lot of imported goods, so we’ve happily shifted to a healthier diet of less processed food. Of course there is still some processed food- but unlike in the US, where it seems like pre-made, instant or boxed everything is the cheapest and most prolific aspect of the grocery store, here it is much cheaper to buy the produce, butter, and dried goods that are produced locally. As a result, we end up eating a lot of basic ingredients, and have a fun time learning new ways to work with flavors to make it exciting.

Sometimes though, it is also a fun (or psychologically necessary?) challenge to try and re-create our favorites from home with the ingredients available here. For example, the other morning Jon and Sam both awoke with a craving for a good hummus sandwich. In the US, hummus would most likely always be in our refrigerator and a favorite restaurant where Jon and Sam both used to work had an excellent hummus sandwich that we remember fondly. We decided to go on a mission to recreate the sandwich. Let us share.

So, for step one in a hummus sandwich we needed hummus. Not available. OK, so we’ll make it. There are a few places that sell chickpeas in cans so we pile on a rickshaw and take a trip to the grocery store that we know has it. We get some chickpeas, some lemon juice, and olive oil. As an exciting bonus we saw that they had some roasted red peppers in a can and we splurge on some artichoke hearts –hooray!

We get home and Jon sets to smashing the chickpeas and some garlic together. We don’t have a food processor, obviously, so it is a manual operation. First we had to mash up the garlic. Then we had to smash up the chickpeas. Even with Jon’s awe-inspiring arm strength, it actually takes quite a while. We add our lemon juice and olive oil until the flavor is about right (no, we didn’t use any tahini for you hummus purists our there- it is not available).

All the hard work paid off though and for dinner we had tasty sandwiches that at least hit close to a certain flavor we were craving even if it was a more “chunky style” hummus than we were used to. Some alfafa sprouts would have made it excellent, but we couldn’t recreate those. Since hummus isn’t exactly a shining star in the realm of appetizing food shots, here’s our night’s build-your-own sandwich table (with the hummus included) – I bet you wish you were coming over for dinner…