Quick Cooking Indian Cuisine - cooking resource

Quick Cooking Indian Cuisine

From Linda Larsen

This is the first of a new series at Busy Cooks: cooking around the world. We'll cover many different and unique cuisines, making sure, of course, that the recipes are easy, quick, simple to make, and delicious. This is not meant to be a comprehensive lesson on Indian cooking, but is a short introduction to the cuisine. Let's get started!

"But we had this for lunch!" Is that a familiar phrase in your family? That's something you won't hear when you try these recipes from the Indian continent. They range from a mild and creamy chicken entree to a spicy steak seasoned with a wet curry paste. You can easily adapt the recipes to reflect your tastes and your children's tastes.

India is a complex country, rich and fascinating, just like its food. The cuisine can be as simple as a one dish meal or a sumptuous feast with courses and condiment after condiment arranged like jewels on a tray.

When you begin experimenting with these recipes, you will quickly learn about flavors and spices intrinsic to the cuisine, and you may even begin adapting old favorites using your new skills. Take a look at Indian Cuisine Glossary for a rundown of some ingredients and terms used in this cuisine.

Most people unfamiliar with the cuisine expect it to be very spicy, with overwhelming lists of ingredients and unfamiliar words. The ingredient lists may be long, but usually the length is made up of spices you can just line up on the counter and add as you cook. Indian cooking tries to incorporate sweet, sour, salty, bitter, astringent, and spicy into all meals; this balance of flavors has spiritual meaning as well.

Top 10 Best Quick Cooking Cookbooks

1) Pillsbury 30 Minute Meals
Well, by now you know how much I trust Pillsbury's books. I worked there and know how carefully and rigorously each recipe is tested before it can be published under the Pillsbury name. This book is even more valuable because there are fully planned meals laid out for you, so all you have to do is shop and cook! (And clean up too, unfortunately.)

2) Betty Crocker's Quick Cooking
One of the best parts of this cookbook is the "Fix It Faster" section. This is a collection of tips on how to cut down each recipe's preparation time even more. And the recipes are fabulous, well tested, delicious family favorites that even kids will like!

3) Healthy 1-2-3
Rozanne Gold is the queen of 3 ingredients or less. She has written many books with this qualification, and all of her recipes work. These recipes are low in fat and calories, and high in nutrients to make you a healthy quick cooking.

4) Desperation Dinners
Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross met at their children's preschool. During a conversation about the difficulty of feeding their families quickly and easily, they developed the idea of 'desperation dinners'. This blossomed into a syndicated newspaper column with great recipes they actually tested with stopwatches. Family classics, updated recipes and lots of advice make this cookbook valuable.

5) The Instant Gourmet
This excellent book relies on fresh foods and layering flavors to make delicious meals in minutes. Recipes cover appetizers, salads, entrees and desserts

6) Desperation Entertaining!
Mills and Ross do it again in this book about entertaining quickly and easily. The organization of the book is really excellent. Within each chapter, you can choose from very quick cooking recipes or those that require more time to make (but are often make ahead). Kid friendly recipes are highlighted.

7) Rachael Ray's 30 Minute Meals
If you've never seen one of Rachael Ray's TV shows on the Food Network, you're really missing something! In '30 Minute Meals' (the show) she cooks a complete meal in 30 minutes - really! The recipes are delicious and this book is fun to read too.

8) The Can Opener Gourmet
With this cookbook in your collection and a well-stocked pantry, you will never be stuck wondering what's for dinner at 5:30 PM. Did you ever think you could prepare Fettuccine with Pumpkin Cream Sauce out of cans and jars?

9) The Four Ingredient Cookbook
This excellent cookbook has more than 700 recipes, all using four ingredients or fewer. The recipes include Sweet and Sour Chicken, Crabmeat Casserole, and Beer Batter Bread. The spiral binding that allows the book to lay flat makes it easy to use in the kitchen too.

10) Quick Meals for Healthy Kids and Busy Parents
The best part about this book is that it is written by three dieticians who are working mothers. You can be assured that the recipes are healthy, the nutrition information is accurate and up to date, and that your kids will actually eat these foods! More than 140 recipes are included.

More info about quick cooking, please visit About.

Quick Cooking

Nothing slows down meal preparation like hunting down ingredients in every corner of your kitchen. Keep a well-organized, well stocked pantry, and quick meals will always be at your fingertips. When you are in a rush, sauteing, frying, grilling and pressure-cooking are faster methods than stewing, braising, and roasting. However, when you have plenty of time but you can't be in the kitchen to monitor the food, stewing, braising, baking, roasting and slow-cooking require less attention than sauteing, frying and grilling.

To choose the fastest equipment for the job, use the right-size pan to help liquids boil faster and prevent areas of the pan from scorching before ingredients are done cooking. Also, you may want to invest in some gadgets and tools that make life easier, such as a garlic press and kitchen scissors. Consider buying a mini food processor. The mini versions do a better job with small batches of chopping (such as onions), and they're a lot easier to clean.

To speed the preparation time, buy ready-cut fresh vegetables and greens, especially chopped onions, shredded carrots, baby spinach, and other ready-to-eat salad greens. Likewise, buy precut stew and stir-fry meat. Or purchase other quick cooking cuts of meat and poultry, such as flank steak, boneless pork loin chops, lean ham, boneless skinless chicken and turkey breasts, turkey tenderloin and ground beef. Most seafood is fairly quick cooking. You can also round out quick meals with frozen vegetables.

To help food cook faster, stir food constantly and consistently, which helps heat penetrate more evenly into the food and speeds up cooking. Also, allow ample room around foods so that heat can circulate. When cooking large quantities of an ingredient, remove individual pieces as they are done to equalize the cooking throughout the batch and allow unfinished pieces to cook faster.

Quick Cooking for Diabetes

If you have diabetes, you might think that there are certain foods that you can't eat, or that you can't enjoy social occasions in the same way as someone who doesn't have diabetes. This is not necessarily the case: in Quick Cooking for Diabetes you will learn how to make changes to your choice of food, your eating habits and cooking, to help you manage your diabetes more effectively and live life to the full.

The recipes in Quick Cooking for Diabetes have been allocated their appropriate glycaemic index¡ªthis is a way of ranking foods containing carbohydrate according to their effect on blood glucose levels. If you have diabetes, combining foods with a low glycaemic index with main meals can help to control blood glucose levels.

Diet makes all the difference to the long-term health of someone with diabetes. If you have diabetes you should reduce your intake of fat, particularly saturated or animal fat, base your meals and snacks on carbohydrate foods like bread and pasta and also eat plenty of fruit and vegetables. Salt and sugar should be used in only minimal amounts.

Eating for good health is about matching your intake of food to your body's needs and keeping your weight at a healthy level, It is also about understanding how to balance food choices, so that you can enjoy eating without feeling guilty Even high-fat, high-sugar foods can be incorporated into your diet plan, if you know how.

Please visit Asian Online Recipes to get your more quick cooking.

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