We are a working couple and love home made Indian food. In between our hectic work life, we find limited time to cook ourselves. We were looking for tips for quickly cooking Indian food and stumbled upon these appliances and ideas. Life has been much easier since:
- Instant Pot: Instant Pot is a seven-in-one multi-cooker that works as an electric pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, yogurt maker, steamer, warmer, and sauté pan all in one. If you want to speed up your Indian cooking, this is an absolute must-buy gadget. It works wonders especially for Indian cooking as one can double it up as Kadhai (cooking pot), pressure cooker, Idli/Dosa batter maker, yogurt maker etc and many more. You should join the famous Facebook group for Instant Pot Indian recipes.
- Food processor to knead the dough: You would not believe how much time and energy you would save by using it. And it works like a charm. We bought Cuisinart’s 8-cup food processor and kneading takes not more than 2 mins. It will take you 5-6 times before you get the ratio right, but once you do, you will want to knead it fresh everyday. If you need step-by-step instructions, watch this video.
- Vidalia Chop Wizard: A simple yet extremely helpful gadget for your kitchen to chop onion, tomatoes, potatoes etc without much fuss. Whether you want to chop vegetables for curry, omelette or salad, this tools comes in handy. Its easy to clean too. It is also available in physical stores like Bed, Bath and Beyond.
- Slow Cooker: Unlike conventional ones, slow cookers can cook consistently at low temperatures for over 12 hours. It is especially good for cooking lentils (dal), chickpeas (channa) and beans. We usually put all the ingredients and keep it at low temperature and time setting before we leave for work and get a warm meal when you are back home after work. We use Crock-Pot’s slow cooker and it has worked great for us so far. You can find a lot of slow cooker recipes online. We follow this food channel on youtube which has some great recommendations.
- Microwave Egg boiler: Quite often we are in a hurry while leaving for office in the morning and are too lazy for cooking breakfast for ourselves. We figured out that using a microwave egg boiler, we could have healthy breakfast without any effort required. Just put them in the microwave for 10 mins and your breakfast is ready. We rarely miss breakfast now.
- Use rice cooker to cook rice.
- Use a Barbecue grill to cook appetizers like Paneer tikka, chicken tikka quickly.
- Cutting veggies takes biggest %age of my cooking time, optimize it by cutting things in bulk(cut – garlic, mirch, ginger – which can last 3 months, cut onions which lasts a week) and storing them so that I don’t have to do cutting at the time of actual cooking.
- Cook enough to last for 4 meals ( lunch+dinner+lunch+dinner). 1.5 hrs to cook E2E(including washing vessels) , and if it lasts for 4 occasions then worth it for me.
- Cook Tadka in bulk on weekend/ once a month’, freeze it; it’ll cut any sabzi prep time in half.
- Boil egg’s and keep it fridge, solve’s the purpose for lite breakfast or dinner or you can prepare curry also within less time
Apart from these quick steps, there are few sites with quick indian food recipes. My favorite among them is www.vahrehvah.com. You can find microwave recipes at www.indobase.com. Few others: recipes.sparkpeople.com, onehotstove.blogspot.com, kavitacooks.blogspot.com etc.
Have more suggestions? Keep them coming in the comments below.