আমার স্বপ্নে দেখা রসগোল্লা সে যে , সাত সাগর আর তেরো নদী পারে (I fancy about that Rasgulla, which is far away from me)

 'The best ever Rasgulla that I have ever had in Johannesburg', that's what Arghya, my flatmate said, after eating two sparrow egg sized homemade Rasgulla(or like that). Not to mention, those were made by me. Arghya moved to Johannesburg in the last week of February, 2021, two months after me. Both of us stayed in the Wits guest house till the end of March and then moved to this apartment, near Johannesburg Zoo.  Since I/we came here, because of corona, our movement is limited within university, home and supermarket. So far we went out of our regular zone only twice, once to dine in a local restaurant and second time to buy fishes from a Bangladeshi shop. So, you can sense how many Rasgulla Arghya had here in Johannesburg.

In the very first week, once we moved to this house, one day, I found that the Milk is not in good condition, because we did not check the temperature in the new fridge. It was set to minimal cold inside the fridge. I was boiling the milk to make tea, but it became channa (Indian cottage cheese). The 1l packet was almost 75% full and I was not in a mood to throw it in the pickItup(that's what they call Dustbin here). Being Bengali, I knew that channa is the main ingredient in most of the sweets. I shuffled through a few bengali sweets recipes and boarded the venture without anything specific in mind. I got the basic idea that, once the channa is made, it needs to be drained, then make small balls or whatever shape you like, and then boil them in sugar syrup. As the final outcome was not set, I put the constraint that the whole duration would depend on my patience.   

Without much worrying, the first two steps went smoothly, at least I thought so. As a part of the experiment, I added a little bit of semolina to the channa dough.  I made around 6 pieces out of them. I put all the small portions in the boiling sugar syrup, waited for 15-20 mins, and it became a bit fluffy. That made me really happy and then the patience game started. I spent 30 mins without moving my focus from the timer. Meanwhile, I changed the side of the balls to save them from burning. After almost 1 hour of boiling in sugar syrup, I thought to check if they were cooked properly, I put a fork in each of them. It seemed to me that they were done, but by cutting them, the clear syrup became cloudy. By that time, my patience battery was completely drained and I turned off the oven. Once it cooled down, I made Arghya to first taste it. I knew he would never say anything bad about 'any food' and he said that exact sentence that I started with. His facial expression was saying something else though. Then I took a bite in one, and OMG! I never ever had such an unpleasant sweet in my life! It looks like baked Rasgulla, but inside it was so sticky. Ultimately the whole thing looked like Channar Payesh (Pudding of Channa).

The final look!

That's how it started.

Anyway, that's the only Rasgulla we had here in Johannesburg.