In today’s fast-moving life, cooking is making a shift from being a therapeutic task to a laborious one. With a constant increase in the number of students and working professionals, easy cooking tips and tricks are always welcoming. However, applying these tips will not only reduce your cooking time, but also help you enhance your cooking abilities without any compromise in taste! Here are a few easy cooking hacks to save time while preparing mouth-watering dishes.
Prepping your veggies
Vegetables are an integral part of your everyday meals. However, it is no surprise that half of your cooking time is spent on chopping vegetables. Tasty dishes are incomplete without colourful veggies that amp up the nutritional value of your meal. To make cooking more straightforward for you, here are some Indian kitchen tips to quickly chop your vegetables:
- Firstly, place a damp cloth below your cutting board to avoid the board slipping away while chopping vegetables.
- Peeling garlic is a difficult task. But if you microwave the garlic for about 30 seconds and then try to peel, it is much easier and simpler.
- Another interesting hack! The most common problem with peeling is that the outer layer scatters all along the floor if you use a fan. Now, take a cup of water and place the peel in it. You can happily sit under the fan and peel garlic!
- Chop bell peppers conveniently by first making a slit on the side and scooping out the center bit. This makes the task a whole lot easier since the seeds do not spillover.
- You can also use a food processor to shred vegetables and make a salad easily. They are extremely easy-to-use and time-saving.
- Boiling potatoes can be time-consuming. Speeded up the process by poking the potatoes with the help of a knife. The holes will help the heat seep into the potatoes and soften them in no time!
Save your fruits
Fruits are a great source of vitamins and natural sugars. However, cutting them up for a salad or a quick snack can be quite a tedious task, especially when you are dealing with pineapples or pomegranates. To add to that, fruits that are cut up need to be stored in dry and air-tight containers to stop them from browning. Here are a few hacks that provide the fruit of convenience.
- Apples are vulnerable to oxidation when stored after slicing. To prevent this, dip the apple slices in salt-water or brush lime juice over them before storing. This way, you can avoid the oxidation process, and thereby prevent browning.
- While storing fruits for a longer time in the refrigerator, wrap the fruits in an aluminium foil sheet or place it in a cloth cover. This increases the life-span of the fruits.
- You can also place bananas individually in the fridge to save them for a long time.
- For quick ripening of fruits, place them in an air-tight container. An age-old technique is to place the fruits in a long rice drum. This will make the fruits ripen faster than usual.
Onions everywhere
Onions are the soul of every Indian dish! Not only are they one of the first ingredients tossed into the frying pan, but they also had a whole lot of flavour without over-powering the dish. However, chopping onions is often annoying due to the teary process it results in. Here are a few cooking hacks to chop them up in style and only leave you teary-eyed while soaking up the warmth of love lingering from your meal.
- Refrigerate onions for about 15 minutes before chopping to avoid irritation in your eyes.
- You can also soak onions in water and later start cutting the onions. Make sure to peel the outer layer before immersing in water.
- Onion choppers make your work simpler. All you have to do is place an onion in the chopper and operate the appliance to get finely cut onions at the tap of a button.
Surprisingly, hair picks can also help you in chopping onions. Peel the outer layer and pierce the hair pick into the onion, start cutting the onions using in the gaps between the hair pick and fasten up the process!
Wealth from left-overs
It is challenging to cook the right quantities of food. In a perfect world, food is relished till the last serving with full tummies and happy hearts, but in real life, you will end up having left-overs. Is it ethical to waste food? Although the answer is evident, you might be confused as to what to do with the left-over food. Worry not! Here are some delicious recipes that you can prepare:
- Idli upma: If you have extra idlis, then cut them into pieces and sauté them in a pan with onions and capsicum. Add some spices to the mixture. Leave it on the pan for some time and garnish with finely chopped coriander. Your tasty upma is ready!
- Mixed Veg Paratha: In case you have some parathas/Chapatis left-over after dinner, you can use them to prepare a super tasty breakfast the next morning. Heat the pan and add some ginger-garlic paste. To this add chopped vegetables of your interest and also the pieces of parathas. Sauté it well after adding necessary spices and salt. Your quick and healthy breakfast is ready to consume!