Improvising Muesli

Breakfast is an unadventurous meal. The rest of the day may involve eating bugs, strangely slimy fruits, herbs that leave your mouth dry for twenty minutes—and for that very reason, breakfast needs to be a comfortable constant in a changing world. Maybe not for you, but definitely for me.

I’m a muesli person. In Wuhan, oddly, I made the shift to 热干面 quite happily, but otherwise, with some shame at my lack of adaptability, I have hunted for crunchy wholegrain offerings and yoghurt at breakfast buffets in a number of countries.

You can tell quite a bit about a country by its upscale shops. Our local has muesli and granola of various persuasions (chocolate?!) but they are expensive. Really expensive. Something like £12/kg and up (750 Tk for 500g). By comparison a জিলাপি (jalebi) at the local is 10 Tk. There are only a handful of foreigners here in Chittagong and most come from China or Korea as managers for the big garment factories. That expensive muesli is for domestic consumption by the middle and upper classes.

In this essay I don’t want to dwell on the very visible income gap in Chittagong, but 1500 Tk/kg is too much. I’ve been surviving off bananas and yoghurt for two months. Yesterday, though, I finally found a way through. What Newars would call baji (in Bangla, চিড়া) is widely available here, in a range that would please even an Asan resident. So are dates, and good yoghurt here is cheap and plentiful. Toast some dark baji, add chopped dates and yoghurt. Ahhhh. It’s crunchy, it has dried fruit and yoghurt, it gets unpleasantly soft if you get distracted. And it’s made from locally available, affordable ingredients.