Easy as pie! Quick cooking fixes for the young cook
Gone are the days of “Oh, I don’t know how to cook!”; it’s the age of blossoming chefs in every home!
Cooking is indeed a life skill and this last year has emphasized the importance of it all the more. While some of us took to learning traditional family dishes at home, others blossomed into talented home chefs under YouTube’s tutorials. From adding too much salt your dish, to burning those precious organic foods that you had bought, in the pan, disasters in the kitchen can strike, any time, to anyone.
In the interest of all the young and new cooks out there, here are some super quick and easy cooking quick fixes, that will help you ace everything, right from your everyday dal chawal prepared with organic foods to lasagna:
Well, we are all too familiar with this one, aren’t we? Adding too much salt or masala is too common a mishap for us to ignore. So, if you end up accidently adding a lot of salt or your favorite spice masala to the dal that you are cooking, take some separately boiled dal and add it to your preparation. It will ease out the taste. You will just end up with an extra bit of dal – eat it, store it, jazz it up with some spice masala, it will never go to waste! If you have a ball of wheat dough lying around, then you can place that in the gravy too – it will help in absorbing salt.
This is yet again such a common one! Chopping onions and shedding tears have almost become synonyms of each other. But you can effectively avoid it by simply keeping the onions in the freezer for a few minutes or soak them in water for some time, before you start chopping them. Cool, isn’t it?
Forgot to defrost your packaged veggies or meat? No microwave at home? There’s a quick fix to it! Just heat up some water and dip the packages in it for a while. And tada! Your job’s done!
We all want to reduce our oil intake, don’t we? Here’s a very simple way to do it. Oil actually prevents your ingredients especially those flavourful spice masala and other spices from not sticking to the pan and burning during tempering and you can easily avoid that, by sprinkling water from time to time on it. Trust us, it works wonders!
If you are cooking Chinese then to add that extra crunch to any dish that you make – from fried rice to chili chicken, make sure that you blanch your choice of vegetables first. And the best way to blanch them is to first boil the vegetables in salt water and then quickly place them in iced water or ice cubes.
If you want to bring home the taste of dhaba or restaurant style non-vegetarian dishes, then the best way to go about it is to marinate your choice of meat in the spice masala that you will be using in the dish, beforehand. This gives the meat more time to absorb the spices, which in turn enhances the taste.
Constant use can easily wear off the coating of your non-stick pans. So, whenever you are washing them, make sure that you do not use a scrubber. To remove those sticky stains, just boil some water in the pan and then wash it off.