Greetings everyone! This Mohammad Sumon! from #Bangladesh

^{Hello everyone! I hope you all are doing well by the grace of the Almighty.}

Today, I am very excited to share my entry for the Contest organized by the Steem For Pakistan community. A special thanks to the community admin @suboohi Apu, for hosting such an engaging competition.

^{Spreading positivity and creativity through my words.}

The Kitchen Diaries: Grandma’s Recipe Remix

In our busy life, we eat hundreds of fancy dishes, but at the end of the day, there is no substitute for the taste of those simple dishes cooked by our mother or grandmother. Today, turning over the pages of the kitchen diary, I am sharing with you a very favorite and simple recipe of my grandmother, which is like nectar to our entire family. That is the ever-familiar and comforting Bengali dish Lentil Bharta. However, today it is not in the usual way; I have created a great remix version by mixing a secret ingredient and a modern touch with my grandmother's old cooking technique.

Lentil Bharta

Why does this recipe remind me of my grandmother?

Whenever I went to the village as a child, my grandmother would see that I did not like very spicy food. Back then, she would make this dal bharta by burning pure mustard oil and adding dried chilies. That taste and aroma are still etched in my memory. Today, I have tried to give a wonderful Remix to my grandmother's traditional recipe a little differently, using my own unusual ingredient fresh lemon juice along with the fresh flavor of raw onions and coriander leaves.

Ingredients:

This amazingly tasty dish can be made with just a few simple and readily available ingredients. Here are the ingredients I used:

Lentil	Fresh Lemon

• Lentils: 1 cup (well cooked)
• Dried Chilies: 3-4 (can be more or less according to your taste)
• Coriander Leaves: 2 tablespoons (for fresh aroma)
• Onion: 3 tablespoons (finely chopped)
• Fresh Lemon Juice: 1 teaspoon (my own remix and secret ingredient)
• Pure Mustard Oil: 1.5 tablespoons
• Salt: As per taste

Coriander leaves	Mustard Oil

Making (Step-by-Step Process)

• First, wash the lentils well and put them in the oven with a little water and salt. The real trick here is the amount of water. Water should be added in such a way that the lentils are boiled thoroughly but no excess water remains. When the lentils are boiled and become completely dry and sticky, remove them from the oven and let them cool a little.

• To bring out the real traditional flavor in the filling, the dried chilies should be lightly roasted on the stove or roasted in a little mustard oil. However, I roasted the dried chilies well. The wonderful smoky aroma that comes out after roasting the chilies enhances the flavor of the lentils many times over.

• In a wide bowl, grind the crushed dried chilies with salt to taste and mix them well with your hands. Then, finely chopped onions and chopped chilies should be crushed very well with your hands. When the onion becomes soft, add the chopped fresh coriander leaves and mix it lightly.

• Now pour pure mustard oil over this mixture. The wonderful pungent aroma of onion, burnt dry chillies and coriander leaves that comes out as soon as the oil is added is the main attraction of this bharta. It is at this stage that I add the main twist of my recipe today—a spoon of fresh lemon juice. The pungency of mustard oil, the pungency of chillies and the sour-sweet aroma of lemon juice combine to create a heavenly aroma.

• Finally, the lentils that have been boiled beforehand should be gently mixed with this wonderful aromatic mixture. Grandma used to say that the more perfectly the bharta is mixed, the better the flavors of all the ingredients will blend with the lentils. That's it, a wonderful dal bharta made with a touch of grandma's memory, dried chili sauce and a refreshing twist of lemon juice.

My Remix and personal feelings on grandma's recipe

Usually, my grandma would lightly fry or burn onions and chilies in oil. But in today's remix version, I have used the smoky flavor of grandma's familiar burnt dried chilies along with whole raw onions, fresh coriander leaves, raw mustard oil and fresh lemon juice. The sharp spiciness of the dried chilies is perfectly balanced by the sourness of the lemon juice, which cuts the heaviness of the dal and gives a great refreshing and lively taste sensation as soon as you put it in your mouth. Using lemon juice has created a wonderful smell (Alhamdulillah).

When I have this dried chili and lemon-fragrant dal bharta with a plate of steaming hot rice in the dinner, I don't need any other dish. Every time I take a bite of lokma, I feel like I've returned to the familiar courtyard of my childhood, where a wonderful combination of grandmother's love and modernity has taken place.

Conclusion

Whenever I take this very simple dal stew lying in a corner of the dining room table, it seems that the civic fatigue accumulated in my heart has disappeared in an instant. The smoke from my grandmother's clay stove or the days in the village courtyard may have disappeared far away with the passage of time, but through the aroma of this cooking, I find my grandmother very close to me every day. My whole family has liked this little lemon juice remix, or experiment, with the traditional cooking tradition taught by my grandmother. Even in this busy time of technology, we should not let these familiar flavors of our roots and memories of our loved ones get lost; this is my wish in today's kitchen diary.

I would like to invite @ninapenda, @bossj23, and @saxopedia to participate in this contest. Hope to see your wonderful entries! 🙂