First of all, I am really sorry for the long title. It happens when I want to literally translate something from Bangla to English. Anyway, today’s dish is another food scrap recipe, meaning that making a delicious meal out of something that are usually thrown out! So today’s recipe is called Bhorrta (spread or mash) that is the most common, very much traditional Bangladeshi dish and it is made from different kinds of gourd peel. Bhorrta can be made of almost any vegetables and I have shared a few recipes in my blog already, which you can read here. But today’s recipe, as I mentioned before, both a bhorrta and food scrap recipe!

So for this recipe, I have saved the skins of medium sizes bottle gourd, wax gourd and pumpkin – veggies that I cooked before. I washed the veggies, peeled off the skin and saved it in my freezer. Normally there’s not much to save from a tiny single vegetable, that why I saved some before I make the dish. However, you can use skins from only one selected vegetable, you don’t need to mix it up like me.
However, the other ingredients remains the same, onion, mustard oil and chili (dry or green). Sometimes we use garlic depending on which vegetable it is. Like today I am going to use a few.

The first step would be to boil the skins til they are soft. I added just enough water to cover them, a table spoon of salt and cooked in low heat covering with lid. I do not like to boil and drain the water of vegetable because it loses the nutrition. However, just have to be careful when water is almost dried out, otherwise it burns from the bottom very quickly.

When water dries out completely, take out from the pan and keep separately. Also check if the skins are properly cooked. Sometimes water dries out quickly but skins don’t get cooked, so in that case, add more water and cook in low heat.

Now in a separate pan, I heated two table spoon of oil (any oil) and added chopped onion, garlic and green chili. Now, you must must must slice green onion before you add them in hot oil, otherwise they pop so big it might hit you in the eye! And something hot and burning in the eye is not a pleasant feeling.
So, fry the spices until golden and we don’t need to fry too brown.

When onion and garlic were nicely sauteed, I added boiled gourd skins to the pan. We need to fry them just a little to enhance the flavor. When the outer color of the skins started to get little brownish, then I turned off the heat and set them separate.

My spread mix are almost ready. I let the mix to cool down to room temperature because my blender don’t like warm food. But if you have a better blender or mixer then you can blend them right away!

After cooling the mixture for 20 minutes or less, I took them in my blender (actually its a juicer but it works just fine for almost anything), added dash of mustard oil and started blending. Now you might need a variable amount of oil. It is like pesto, you add oil step by step to ensure smooth blending. You may want to add some water but I did not because that will make the spread runny and not delicious anymore! So keep on blending until you get a smooth paste (or rough, as you desire) and keep adding oil. I also checked the salt in between, because adding oil sometimes increases the need of salt.

Finally I made my mixed-gourd-skin spread aka Chchokla Bhorrta. I know it looks like pesto but it taste way different. We always eat our Bhorrta’s with rice, but as I mentioned, you can eat it as a spread with your favorite piece of bread or even eat as a sauce with tortilla with other fillers!

Recipe: 6 Servings Prepping and cooking time: 30 minutes

Ingredients: Skins of any gourds (Zucchini, bottle gourd, wax gourd, pumpkin) Spice and Condiments: 1 big Onion 1-1.5 tbs fine Salt 60ml Bangladeshi Mustard Oil Green Chili – as desired 3-4 cloves Garlic

Instruction: 1. Wash and peel the skins of the desired vegetables. Boil them with just enough water with a table spoon of salt. Dry out the water completely. Check if the skins are properly cooked. 2. Heat two table spoon of vegetable oil in a fry-pan, add onion, garlic and green chili slices and saute until they change color. 3. Add cooked veggie-skins to the pan. Sautee with onion and garlic until they starts to change color. Then turn off the heat and set them aside toPachmishali Chchokla Bhorrta cool down in room temperature. 4. Take a good blender, add cooled down and sauteed veggie skins and mustard oil. Blend until smooth or pesto like consistency. Add more salt if needed. Serve with rice, bread or tortilla.