Saturday 23 January 2010

Ease of access

This post is a short pictorial pointer to making cooking easy. Invest half an hour in chopping vegetables and putting them away in packets, so that when you want to cook, there shall be no nonsense about taking cutting and chopping and peeling and suchlike. All you have to do is wash the vegetables under a running tap, and it's ready to be cooked. The same applies to meats. Supermarket package their meats in a way that takes up quite a bit of space to store, and it's damaging to the rest of pork chops, say, when all you need is two out of a package of six. The unused chops get defrosted and refrozen over and over, hardly the best for meat you intend to eat one day. My choice of wrapping is sticky plastic wraps that come in several brands. I get whicever is closest to me at the shops.

Fruits are usually trickier, but the one time I bought pineapple I cut it into thin slices and stored them in a airtight tiffin box. Oranges and things can be peeled immediately and eaten, but peeling and chopping a pineapple or melon when one takes a fancy to it is tough. Much easier to clean them out and store them in neat, immediately-edible forms.















Broccoli, mushrooms, green beans. Pork chops.















Onions, ginger, green chillies, lemon. The sticky plastic wrap I use.


Pineapples

1 comment:

Sue said...

Yep, that's what I do too. Other freezer-friendly things include pancake batter (I make extra and freeze half), dough (ditto), boiled dals of all kinds (I boil without turmeric or salt so as to not confuse myself about proportions when I cook the frozen packs) and idlis.

You just have to make sure you defrost stuff right. Pancake batter, dough and idli don't go into the microwave as they are. Idlis need fresh steaming to make them edible (which can be done in the microwave) while pancake batter and dough defrost fine in the pre-set defrost setting of some microwaves, but not mine: so I leave them outside and pop them (in packing) in a bowl of hot water to hurry the process up.

Why don't you post recipes of Bengali snacks? You know, chops and cutlets and so on.