Alpana Habib strives for variety

Alpana Habib is a renowned chef, and a familiar face to those who follow cooking shows on TV. In a conversation with The Daily Star, she shared her thoughts on the dietary aspects of Ramadan, and shared a recipe too. 

“Cooking should be fun and easy. There should be variety of food on one plate. Since I live with my in-laws, they like to have the conventional iftar like bora and beguni. But I do my best to make at least one different food item each day. Fruit chaat, pasta salad, omelette pakora, chowmein, keema stuffing are simple and easy food items. I like to see different food of different textures, so that the iftar table looks inviting.” 

“One thing that should be kept in mind that our body does not get any liquid while we fast. It is better to open the fast with water rather than juice that contains too much sugar. Oily food and sugar directly gets absorbed by the body, if there is no intake of food during the entire day. To have a proper balance diet during breaking our fast, here is a quick recipe. Take:  

1 cup of sour yogurt
4 cups of water
1 cup of sugar
6 lemon and slice it
1tsp salt 

Squeeze the lemon and mix all the above ingredients together. Stir them for a while and keep the mixture in the freezer. Make sure that you filter the lemon, or else the mixture will be bitter. And serve it just before breaking the fast.