Bengali cuisine is a soulful array of flavors that makes the taste buds dance with its enticing spices. It is a cuisine that is not just consumed for sustenance but is also a form of celebration. It evokes a deep sense of warmth and nostalgia and reminds us of our traditional heritage. Often, when we are far away from home, we miss our Bengali culture and we try to stay connected to it through the food that represents our identity. And to keep our very own Bengali cuisine alive, the goal of the Wannabe Cook is to uplift traditional Bengali cuisine in the digital world. This will not only help people around the world get a taste of our heartfelt cuisine but also help to pass on the emotional familial bond that the cuisine reflects!
In the past year, the Wannabe cook has tried to give us culinary experience to help us relive our traditions and cultures. This would definitely not be possible without the love and support of all our members in the Facebook group! The love and response that we have received from all of you have helped us to complete this year with a great bang! And not to forget our small yet growing Wannabe Cook team for working relentlessly throughout the year to uplift the essence of Bengali cuisine!
Let me take you through the fun-loving foodies:
1. Sunita Yousuf
She is the brainchild of the Wannabe Cook! A food enthusiast whose love for spreading Bengali cuisine made Wannabe Cook come alive.
2. Zoya Ahmed and Sumaiya Zaman
The Wannabe Cook essentially started with the two of them and Ishrat Jahan. So, you can say that they are the oldest members of our team! Zoya Ahmed looks after strategic planning, marketing, and PR, whereas Sumaiya Zaman n represents Wannabe Cook in New York.
3. Aranna Das and Rumana Jahan
They present the dishes that we all want to savor. Their love for cooking lets us explore their various culinary adventures.
4. Ishrat Jahan and Obaedul Islam
They are the ones who make it easy for you all to search for our recipes. Ishrat Jahan looks after the SEO specialist and Obaedul Islam handles the website’s UX/UI.
5. Ananna Das and Amena Ahmed
They talk about the history of cultural and traditional Bengali food while taking you down memory lane!
So, what did the Wannabe Cook achieve in the past year?
We received 192 recipe submissions and 93 contributor recipes in the past year! Imagine the number of unique Bengali recipes that are there which are yet to be discovered!
The team has also written 20+ blogs on the history of the cuisine and shared tips on it so that it will be easier for ALL the Wannabe cooks to learn how to cook Bengali food easily. The blogs also talk about the experiences that we had through our recipe contests and the emotions that are related to the various dishes.
Along with that, our Facebook followers reached 15k and our Instagram followers have 4.6k followers. As you can see below, we have 77 YouTube subscribers and 2.7k Facebook group members. We are hoping to increase this in number so that we can reach and engage with more Wannabe Cooks!
Encouraging Bengali Culinary Experiences
No matter where we stay, we always crave our soulful home-cooked food! Before moving abroad, most of us usually do not know how to cook Bengali food. But when we stay away from home, whenever we miss our family, we associate them with a Bengali dish. You see, as I mentioned before, Bengali cuisine is a celebration. The cuisine itself is so rich that it evokes our senses and gives them a sense of comfort and warmth.
Growing up in a Bangladeshi household, we would all hear the sizzling sound of the spices simmering in hot oil. The house would be filled with the aroma of the spices. Slowly, we would see our family members coming together, surrounding the dining table. The dishes would be placed on the table carefully and cooked with love and care.
Now, when we are away from our homes, to ease our souls, we often look for ways to stay connected to our roots- and like always, food always acts as a therapist and gives comfort to our minds.
With this thought, the Wannabe Cook encourages people to share their recipes and cooking videos so that everyone can learn to cook their own home country’s food. This would also help to promote our culture that has been passed down from generation to generation.
Encouraging the Bengali culinary experience would install a sense of belongingness to our home country and keep our roots close to our hearts.
In Bengali cuisine, spices play a vital role. Spices help to balance the flavor and enhance the overall taste of the dishes. However, the Wannabe Cook team realized how authentic spices are less available now and, for this reason, the authentic taste of food is somewhat forgotten. Keeping this in mind, we want to connect the world with natural, authentic spices to bring back the original taste of Bengali food.
Think about it, when our grandmothers and mothers used to cook, the spices made the dish tantalizing. For this reason, we are even working on our spice packaging designs so that the true essence of the spices is reflected in the packaging designs!
But until the packaging designs are complete, we will keep it a surprise for you all!
The Upcoming Yers of The Wannabe Cook
One year went by fast and we are excited about the coming years! The coming years are packed with ongoing plans! We would like to turn The Wannabe Cook into a digital publication where food enthusiasts will get featured for their writing about food or their cooking. Isn’t that exciting?
The Wannabe Cook will also launch spice boxes with recipes given so you can create them and show them to us!
And that’s not all as the Wannabe Cook encourages cooking of Bengali cuisine, we will and have already, in a few recipe contests, tried to get to know the contributors and give them a platform to showcase their home businesses and their passion for cooking! After all, the love that we receive from you guys is what motivates us to keep going!
We all know that cooking Bengali food requires patience and attention to detail. The slow process allows us to let out our emotions into the various making the whole process a mindful one.
We, the Wannabe Cook team, wholeheartedly would like to thank you for supporting us and making the past year a success! To many more milestones!
