I recently started watching the tips posted and love the idea! They are very useful. I thought I could contribute something for all those busy working women out there like myself. It is quite challenging to prepare dinner after you get home in the evening. I usually get home around 7:00PM and am quite tired. I like to cook and serve atleast one fresh meal for my family. Typically I like to spend not more than half hour to 45 mins in the kitchen. Here are a few things that can be done during the weekends that could speed up the cooking process during the week:
1. Peel the onion (do not cut the head out). Keep the whole peeled onion in a ziplock bag in the refrigerator. Each day it is easier to take the onions that you need and quickly chop them up. Sometimes, I use the food processor to chop the onions and it is mighty quick.
2. Grind ginger and garlic together into a paste and store in the refrigerator. This can be used for upto a week or more.
3. Put green chillies in a food processor. Do not grind them too fine. I like mine to be a little coarse. Store in the refrigerator.
4. Keep home made Dania powder and Jeera Powder handy.
5. I usually ask my babysitter to cut the vegetables for me. This way, when I get home I am ready to get going.
Doing all of the above would save me about 20-30 mins of prep time every day.
Ingredients:
1 and 1/2 cup Aara flour (a flour which is also used to starch cotton clothes)
3 and 1/2 cup sugar
1 cup ghee
1/2 spoon nimbu phool
cardomom essence or any as per choice
cashews, food color, 4 cup water
magastari
Procedure:
1) First, mix the flour in 1 cup water well.
2) Put the remaining 3 cups water to boil in a wok and add the 3&1/2 cup sugar to it. Then take it down and pour this water through a seive in a containier and then pour it again in the same wok and put on gas.
3) Add the flour which we had mixed with water to the wok and keep stirring good.
4) When it starts to thicken a little bit add ghee. And when ghee is well mixed in then add food color(any green/orange/red/yellow/orange) then add nimboo phool and cashews and add essense and stir good.
5) Then finally take it down and pour it in a dish with sides like a baking pan and take a bowl with a touch of ghee on the underside and level it . Then sprinkle magastari (white seeds used to garnish) and then refrigerate it. Then after 6 hours or so make cuts as desired and serve.
3 cups gram dal(chana dal)
2 onions finely chopped
4 green chillies finely chopped
ginger paste 1 tsp
and garlic paste 1 tsp
3 tsp salt
10- 14 curry leaves
oil to fry
1) Soak dal for two hours. Drain and use only dal.
2) Put in food processor to grind the dal. Do not add water. The dal should be ground very coarse- even a few big pieces of dal seen is good.
3) Add all the other ingredients - the finely chopped onions, curry leaves, ginger and garlic paste, salt, green chillies to the ground dal.
4) Shape into 2 to 3 cm round vadas, flatten them a little and deep fry in hot oil till crisp. Serve hot with chutney.