Follow me on Twitter. Add me as a friend on Facebook . Visit my Flickr photostream.
“Prano Bhoriye Trisha Hariye More aaro aaro aaro dao pran| Tabo bhubane tabo bhabone More aaro aaro aaro dao sthan|| ”15 days to go for the biggest Bong festival of the year. Yes you have guessed it right, its Durga Puja time. And to mark the occasion, we at Cook Like a Bong are organizing an event, “Durga Puja Food Festival”. [Logo Courtesy: Dr. Satyaki Basu]

About Durga Puja
Autumn brings in a series of festivities. Among all these festivals the four day long Durga Puja or Dusshera is the most important and the most prominent social festival among Hindus. Durga Puja is mainly celebrated in the Eastern parts of India. Other states of the country (Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad) and even in different countries have started celebrating the worship of the goddess of power. Durga Puja is the most significant social, cultural and even economic event of the year.
Buying new clothes, going pandal hopping, pushpanjali (showering flowers at the goddess), the sound of dhak (Bengali drum), the dhunuchi dance, and the immersion dance are an integral part of the Durga Puja festival. It is the time of homecoming, meeting friends and relatives, eating out, eating whatever you wish, a big and long smile. This is the time of publishing of the “Sharadiya Sankha” or “Pujabarshiki” (the festival collection of literary works) featuring works of both established and not so established poets and authors. And, here we are with our Sharadiya Event for this year.
eBook Announcement
Plus, we’ll create an e-book to celebrate the culinary side of this autumn festival. The eBook will feature mouthwatering recipes and photographs, useful anecdotes and notes and of course some free publicity for the featured authors.
Get featured in the eBook
Please send in your entries for the event. There is no limit to the number of recipes you send, nor is there any restriction on what you send. The recipes may be Bengali (preferably but not necessarily) or any other cuisine, vegetarian or non-vegetarian, starters, soups, salads, entrée, or dessert. Those who don’t want their recipes to be published in the eBook will see those only in the round-up posted at the end of this month in our blog. The recipes in the eBook will have due credit to their authors.
Sending entries to this event makes you eligible to be a part of the eBook. So, hurry and send in your entries as soon as possible.
We invite you to be a part of the celebrations. And the eBook. 🙂
Why should you participate?
- Free Publicity to a wide audience (This site currently has 15000+ pageviews a month)
- Your recipe will be a part of the eBook, and thus your recipe will have offline access, and will bring back more readers to your blog
- The joy of being ‘published’
- Sheer joy of helping a fellow blogger in her project 🙂
How do I benefit?
- Releasing an eBook is my long pending project. And what better occasion that Durga Puja?
- E-book means offline access, spreading the word via email and doc sharing. And thus, more ‘comeback’ readers
- Yet another way to celebrate Sharodotsav
Event Rules:
- Please post recipes on your blog along with a track back to this post
- Optional: Please use the event logo
- If you want to send us any archived entries please update the post with a link to this event so that more people get to know about it
- You don’t need to repost it. Search engines don’t like duplicate content and that’s why you should avoid it. Here’s a link if you want to learn more about why and how’s of duplicate content.
- If you have a draft recipe that you would like to send us, that’s okay. Just ensure two points:
- your blog’s side bar has the event link/logo; and
- when you publish this draft, there’s a the event link/ logo is present in the post
- Sending a recipe photograph is compulsory. [You can learn more about food photography here]
- If you don’t have a blog and yet want to participate, you’re welcome. Just send in your recipes, preferably with an image of the end product to the mentioned mail id.
Send in your entries to bengalicuisine@gmail.com with “Durga Puja Food Festival” as the subject.
3. Last date 22nd September 2009, 11:59pm IST
Details Required:
- Your name:
- Blog name:
- Blog URL:
- Recipe:
- Recipe URL:
- What type of dish (eg: starter, soup, entrée, dessert):
- Cuisine (Andhra, Bengali, Punjabi, Oriya etc):
- Any memories associated with the dish (optional):
- Any special decorations you created for the festival (optional):
- Also, the following if you want the recipes to be enlisted in the eBook, send in your:
- Food Photograph
- Your profile pic
- About you
Bonus
A winner will be chosen for this event and will be awarded with a prize (to be declared later). Evaluation criteria – ease of preparation, suitability to the festival, relevance of the photograph and notes beyond recipe.
Should there be any other criteria for evaluation?
If you like this post, please consider linking to it or sharing it with others. I’ll love to hear your comments too. You can also Subscribe to BengaliCuisine by Email, or Subscribe in a reader

wish u all durga pooja wishes
Thank you Deepti for your wishes. Wish you the same
Sounds great!
Where this e-book will be available?
You can read more about Durga Puja: http://www.durgasite.com/durga-puja/
You can download the e-book from the homepage itself, or just click on this link
I just wanted to stop for a moment and tell you how much I enjoy your blog. It’s really been an eye-opener to see how sites like yours can provide such great info and thrive on the web. Congrats on your success and it’s nice to see your hard work paying off.
Hi,
I am Yogesh Goel, one from the Amar Durga Puja team. I am here to invite you to participate in the most unique initiative ever on the net on Ma Durga. We have a website AmarDurgaPuja.com and its totally user driven website. We want to bring Ma Durga to everyone’s home. Even to people who can’t be here during pujas. We want to make everyone feel at home and thats why this website.
Amar Durga Puja (ADP) is an attempt by FOURDY Group to take Durga Puja to the world by sharing information and photos to help everyone in experiencing the thrill of Durga Puja. To make this happen, we started http://www.amardurgapuja.com in 2009 as a photography competition which received an overwhelming response from the user of various countries like India, Bangladesh, United States, Australia, United Kingdom and many more who showed their love for the festival by submitting 1,000+ photographs within a span of 6 days – making it the largest Durga Puja gallery online. Later, this year we were also recognized by Spanish Magazine – Global Voices (www.globalvoices.org).
This is a pictorial and video website where users can submit their entire collection and make it seen to the world and also share them. we want to make it a hub which everyone can cherish for life.
Do visit and make urself a part of this greatest initiative ever.
our website address is-
http://www.amardurgapuja.com/
And our facebook page address is-
http://www.facebook.com/amardurgapuja
Hope to see u participating & contributing soon. Do not forget to tell about this to your friends too.
Take Care,
Be well,
Yogesh Goel
For,
Amar Durga Puja team
FOURDY Group
Hey very nice blog!! Man .. Beautiful .. Amazing .. I will bookmark your blog and take the feeds
Wow thats a brilliant idea. Absolutely interesting too. Count me in. I would send something though we dont have the custom of celebrating this pooja. 🙂
Wish you a great success. 🙂
.-= Nithya´s last blog ..Internaltional Food Feast – American Toll House Cookies =-.
Great event ,shall surely send my entries..
Best of luck for your e-book
Neha,
Eagerly waiting for your entries and thanks for your wishes 🙂
hi Sudeshna,
Thanks so much for stopping by :)it was really sweet of u:)
The event seems very exciting, Wishing you all the best and happy hosting!
You guys are doing an amazing job! Kudos!
Keep up the spirit!
Best wishes!
TC
.-= Suparna´s last blog ..Coconut Treat 🙂 =-.
Suparna,
Thank you so much for all the wishes. Please do send in some entries for the event.
I might have to opt out of this as I have two days to go before I fly out for a while. Bummer.
But I can share a few of my favourite Pujo food memories:
– serving food in our building’s pujo
– getting a full bhaar of chutney for this after lunch
– sweating it out in the Bandra pujo stalls… feeling very religious, put pujo that is
.-= kalyan k´s last blog ..Serendipity … posto murgi (chicken in poppy seeds) =-.
Hi,
Nice event. I try to send something for durgapuja event.
Kamala,
Thanks so much for dropping by, eagerly waiting for your recipes:)
Hi Sudeshna,
Yesterday i submitted my entry. please check.
cheers.
Kamala,
Thanks for the lovely entry, will love to get some more recipes for the festival
hi thanks for the comment. will send my entries soon!!
.-= sukanya´s last blog ..hilsa paturi =-.
Sukanya,
Hope to see some great recipes from you
hi sudeshna
I read about the food festival. A very nice idea. have you started accepting the entries?? nd how many entries can one send?
mine is a food blog which is only two months old and has a website(though it is under re-designing) where i have some bengali recipes posted. how can i send it thru recipe url or req the whole thing.
a nice blog btw how long u hav been bloggng?
.-= sukanya´s last blog ..hilsa recipe – I =-.
Sukanya, a warm welcome to BengaliCuisine. Sudeshna is having some internet trouble so I thought I would reply. Hope thats OK with you.
Yes, we’ve started receiving entries. You can send as many entries as you like. However, if you would like to be featured in the eBook, just ensure that you send the photographs as well. You can send in your earlier posted entry as well – please ensure that you append the post with this event’s link/logo. Please feel to email/comment if you have more questions.
I just checked out your site – Ilish Macher Tattora looks delicious!
If i make something festive i sure will send you.
.-= Happy Cook´s last blog ..Fresh Cherry Cake =-.
It need not be festive, send in whatever you want to have in this festive season 🙂
Nice event dear, sounds fun, happy hosting!
.-= Parita´s last blog ..Farfalle with Eggplant Marinara Sauce =-.
Parita,
Thanks for your wishes, I hope to get some great recipes from you
Great idea and great event, sudeshna…will definitely send you something
Thanks Indrani. Its open just for a fortnight, as we wanted to publish the eBook before the pujas, so please do sen din your entries asap.
ok … will start fishing. But thanks a lot for the note on duplicate posts. I had posted a number of posts on my blog on a friend’s site to help populate it. Now i know better
.-= kalyan k´s last blog ..Confession time … grilled fish in peri peri sauce with sinful mashed potatoes =-.
Best of luck for the fishing spree :D. Wish to get some recipes from you
Cool event and it is a great idea to publish a e-book. Good luck.
.-= Radhika´s last blog ..Spicy-Tangy Sweet Corn =-.
Radhika thank you so much for the wishes:). Wish to get some contributions from you.