This year is my first time growing bottle gourd plant in Europe. I mainly grew it for the leaves to eat shak vaji or eat with fish curry. I am pretty happy with the results as a beginner, but also it gives an enormous joy having freshly home grown vegetables with family!

I made two meals with the leaves I harvested the first time, one is fish curry and another is this one- stir fried leaves or as we call it in Bangladesh – lau shak vaji. The ingredients are same as usual, dried red chili, onion, garlic, salt and oil.

There was total 249g of fresh leaves taken for the stir fry recipe. This is enough to make lau shak vaji for two people.

I want to show you some uniqueness of bottle gourd leaves. You cannot feel from the picture, but the leaves have velvety smooth texture, unlike pumpkin or zucchini leaves. Leaves have two different colors on two different sides, downside is more white in colour and upper side is more like dark greenish. The best thing about bottle gourd plant is there are no spikes or thorns, which makes it very easy to handle and edible.

To begin with, I washed the leaves thoroughly with cold water and then separated stems and leaves. Yes the stems are edible, you can put them as a whole or chop roughly.

The best way to chop the leaves is the stack some same sized leaves first, fold it, cut in the middle and stack them together again and then cut like thin ribbons. This way, you can handle the big leaves like a pro and get a evenly chopped leaves, which also ensure easy cooking.

Now in a saucepan, add vegetable oil, and when heated add dried red chili, garlic slice. When they are slightly golden, add onion and fry until golden. Do not add chili, garlic and onion all at once like me, because the flavors would not get released.

When onions are golden, add chopped leaves. Let them shrink in volume first to handle it easy. When the volume get reduced in reasonable size, add salt to taste. The reason to add salt later is to avoid putting so much, because its hard to measure the amount of salt with large volume of leaves. So best to wait until leaves get shrinked in size

Continue to stirring leaves in medium high heat until it gets to darker in color and starts releasing oil from the side. As you can see in the photos, within few minutes the shak(leaves) would reduced much in volume and look more greeny than before.

You can taste a bite before you take them off of the pan, whether leaves are cooked thoroughly. If you like it more crispy, let them cook more. But remember, the more you cook leaves, the more they get darker in color.

In Bangladesh, we always eat any shak vaji with white rice. Nothing different this time, me and my husband gladly enjoyed home grown bottle gourd leaves aka lau shak bhaji with rice. Life is beautiful!

Recipe: Bottle Gourd leaves Stir Fry- serves two.

Bottle Gourd leaves – 250g Onion – 1 Garlic – few cloves (as per taste) Dry red chili – as per taste Salt – as required Oil

1. Wash bottle gourd leaves thoroughly with cold water. 2. Roughly chop leaves, like described above. 3. In a pan, heat oil and add dried red chili, sliced onion and garlic. Fry them until onion garlic are golden brown. 4. Add chopped leaves and continue to stir them until shrinked 5. When all leaves get shrinked, add salt. 6. Stir fry leaves until they get cooked. Serve with rice. Enjoy!