an alternative healthy diet

The days of the age old recipe of vegetable stew, handed down from mother to daughter, are gone. Niramish, delicious as it can be, is deemed easily expendable. Our ever hungry taste buds are continually searching to break the monotone, tired of the same old. When we were children, vegetables would mean boiled, tasteless bland. But now with more vegetables than ever to choose from, veggies are coming back in a big way.

Be it a Mason jar salad for a tasty office lunch or a soup that kids won't make funny faces at, these vegetables are now readily available and at prices not too steep. Plus now the names mean more than TV characters. Broccoli was a fancy variety of cauliflowers doubling as villains in Powerpuff Girls episodes. Now, we know it can be eaten. And since we also know how to grow up, most of the greens served are fresh off the field.

Supermarkets seem to be the obvious choice when looking for uncommon vegetables. But most bazaars now sell these. The strawberries from Dinajpur and Rajshahi to the lime produced in Chittagong, the butter mushrooms from Bhaluka and iceberg lettuce from Savar, the Gulshan 1 bazaar houses all under one roof. Cherry tomatoes sell for a mere 100 taka per kg or so while Chinese cabbages are only 20 takas apiece. Even capsicum, fresh and glowing in their colourful varieties make their way here from India are range from Tk 30 – 100. Herbs of all sorts from parsley and celery to jazz up the traditional tomato-cucumber salads and red strawberries to get the children to eat their fruits.

With supermarkets like Unimart, Shwapno and Agora, everything has become much easier. If you do not have the time to spend roaming around a bazaar, head to one of these outlets. Packaged and ordered, you find everything under one roof. While prices may be a bit steeper the point stands that along with our tastes, our choice of vegetable items has kept pace.