Nolen gur er Sondesh...

As you all know how much I love winter, given I do not have to shovel a snow covered path to get into my car. The pleasurable winter in Kolkata is most welcoming, not only does it give us a break from the humid heat we experience most of the year, but it also offers an array of different vegetables, fruits and specialties like nolen gur or date palm jaggery. If you haven’t tasted nolen gur or khejur gur or date palm jaggery then you are missing something in your life. The complex layered taste of this jaggery is difficult to express in words. It has a caramel, burnt taste with subtle sweetness.

Nolen gurer norom paaker sandesh...

Sandesh or Sondesh is a popular Bengali dessert. Sandesh are categorised and named depending on the flavor and the way it is cooked. Sandesh can be flavored in several different ways, vanilla, cardamom, saffron, chocolate, fruit pulps and many more. Sometimes Sandesh are cooked very little to make a very soft melt-in-mouth dessert, those are called norom paker sandesh(norom=soft, pak=cooking). And some are cooked for a quite a long time and that results to a hard sweet, kora paker sandesh(kora=hard, pak=cooking).