So, first of all, mishti doi, or as they call it in English, sweet curd. (Which I refuse to use. It sounds much less appetizing, and kind of gross, like maybe sweet cottage cheese or something.)
The picture above is actually tak doi, sour yogurt, (what we know as "plain yogurt" in the US) but you get the picture. Ha ha, quite literally! Alright, bad pun. The only real difference between sweet yogurt and sour yogurt is the level of sweetness, and the fact that sweet yogurt is slightly brown due to the caramalized sugar from the cooking process. A note on the sweetness: this was actually the first sour yogurt that we didn't buy packaged from the supermarket, and it's surprisingly sweet compared to what we had been eating. I'm not sure if all the shop-made sour yogurt is slightly sweet, or if it was just where we got it from, but in any case, this stuff is really good too.
But back to the sweet stuff. Jarrod and I had heard about mishti doi from Protima Didi, our language instructor, but had never really gotten the authentic stuff. You see, the way it works around here is that, in addition to balls of syrup-saturated fried dough and everything else they display in the window, traditional Bengali sweet shops (as opposed to the cake shops that are also pretty popular here) also have a fridge full of different-sized earthen containers of yogurt--both sweet and sour.
The earthen container is a neat phenomenon that I had intended to write about seperately, but why not just make this an extra-long post? You can see from the picture above that the yogurt is in a sort of clay pot. The cha (sugary, milky tea) you buy on the street is also served in mini earthen cups--what Jarrod is drinking from below:
What's so cool about them is how environmentally-friendly they are! I can get a cup of cha from anywhere on the street (don't worry, it's always hot enough to burn my tongue), drink it, and then just throw the cup down, shattering it to bits. It's fun, and clay! For yogurt, the earthenware pots apparently soak up the extra moisture in the yogurt, giving it a consistant texture.
Anyway, so long story short, we finally went into a sweet shop and got some mishti doi day before yesterday. It was absolutely delicious. The stuff of dreams. It even had a cream top, like Brown Cow yogurt does. I think it's Brown Cow...well anyway. Obsession #1. I will be eating yogurt every day from here on out.
Obsession #2 is, of course, the pomegranate. Here is a generic picture of a pomegranate. I didn't really have time yesterday to go out and take a picture of the piles in the market, so you'll have to be content with this.
It's not that they're an extraordinary fruit or anything. They're just really fun to eat mindlessly, the seeds are really pretty, like jewels, and they're cheap and abundant. Pomegranate season is just beginning, so I'll be able to find them for quite a while still. Oh, they're also healthy. I can't complain about always wanting to eat fruit, right?
So yeah. That's that. I'm sure you'll hear a lot more about various food obsessions in the next year, so be prepared. I like food :)
--Emily
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