Naila hosts at her home in Keller with her husband. She is excited to share all about her heritage, cuisine and food traditions. Start your experience with a cooking class followed by a meal you helped prepare. Join Naila in her kitchen for a 1-2 hours hands-on cooking class to learn some of her favorite dishes, that have resulted by combining flavors from Bangladesh, where she grew up, and Texas, the place she now calls home. You will learn to make Bengali-style quesadillas - beef or chicken keema (minced meat cooked with Bengali spices) sandwiched between two tortillas with cheese and grilled to a crispy perfection and her signature dum aloo, using whole new potatoes from the nearby supermarket. Or she can also teach you to make a typical Bengali meal of chicken seekh kebab or chicken curry and lentil and rice biryani. After your cooking class, join Naila at the dining table to share the meal you helped prepare, which will be served with salad and jardah, a sweet and buttery vermicelli dessert.
Naila can accommodate travelers who are lactose free, gluten free, vegetarian and vegan. Please let her know in advance when booking the experience.
This is just a sample menu to give you an idea of the types of dishes the host cooks. Your menu will vary according to seasonal availability.
Please choose either Menu 1 or Menu 2, both will be served with salad and dessertMenu 1: Bengali-style quesadillas and Dum aloo (small potatoes cooked in spices)Menu 2: Chicken seekh kebab or Chicken curry and Lentil and rice biryaniSalad Jardah (a sweet and buttery vermicelli dessert)Naila grew up, lived, and worked in Bangladesh, in the civil service, for the first thirty years of her life, before immigrating to the US in 1995. Naila’s passion for cooking developed after her daughters moved out, and having to cook for her husband, a picky eater, gave her the opportunity to sharpen her culinary skills! Cooking not only gave Naila respite from the vacuum she felt as an empty-nester, but also provided a creative outlet for her to try out new fusion dishes - blending flavors of Bengal with Tex-Mex dishes of Texas. In close-knit Bengali diaspora, throwing parties and entertaining with home-cooked dishes are traditions that Naila is proud of, and now she would like to share the same with travelers visiting Texas.
