You can Easily Cook Vegetarian food like a Pro Now

Let’s go through the basics. Things you need in pretty much every Indian dish.

Fresh ingredients

1. Onion
2. Tomato
3. Garlic
4. Ginger
5. Chilli
6. Coriander

Spices and other ingredients

1. Turmeric powder
2. Garam masala
3. Chilli powder
4. Cumin
5. Ghee/ olive oil/ any oil
6. Salt,pepper to taste

Let me give you a secret tip to make your gravy/ sauce, super creamy.

Cook your onion, tomato, ginger,garlic and chilli for 15 minutes in a of spoon of oil. Let it cool down for half an hour. Then put it in a blender,mixer.

(Get a separate cheap blender for onions, don’t use your smoothie blender, onions have got a strong smell.)

This paste will be super smooth and creamy, without adding any cream to it. So a little bit healthier.

You can add cashews in the mix at the start if you want that nutty flavour, it also makes it more creamy.

Once you have the sauce/gravy blended, put a spoon of oil in the same pan, don’t worry about washing it. Add some cumin seeds, cook for 30 seconds and add the sauce in the pan on medium heat, let it simmer for 15 minutes.

After that you can add the spices in it, teaspoon of turmeric, 2 teaspoons of garam masala, chilli powder if you like. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Let these spices cook for 5–10 minutes until they change colour into bright red/orange and you will be able to smell the spices cooked.

This is pretty much the sauce and you can add whatever you want to it.

Thickness of the sauce

You can make the sauce as runny and soupy as you want, depending on what you are planning to cook. Similarly you can keep it as dry as possible without adding much water in it.

For example, if you are cooking legumes, you can have them as runny as you want, like a nice warm soup. Or you can have them with less sauce and have it in a sandwich if you want or dunk different breads in it.

If you are cooking mixed vegetables, you can keep the sauce really dry and add all the vegetables. So it’s a dry dish you can have it with rice,breads in sandwiches and whatever you want it with. You can still add water to the dish and make it a good runny sauce and have it with rice.

Tomato theory

So how tomato works in Indian cooking is, onion to tomato ratio is 1:2. So if you are adding 1 onion you will be adding 2 tomatoes to make a balanced sauce. Approximately same sizes of them both, if you got smaller tomatoes add more to balance the dish.

Now if you love tomato, there are many dishes in Indian cooking that use of double the time tomatoes, because the dish is about tomatoes. For example a famous dish in India is “Cheese Tomato”. It’s got tomato in it’s name so be generous. So the onion tomato ratio here would be 1:4, 1 onion to 4 tomatoes to make the sauce tomato tangy.

So with different dishes/recipes you can play around with ingredients to create the perfect balance that suits you. Like in my cooking I sometimes need a chilli fix and add extra chillies as I love it and many people can’t handle it. So it’s your personal preference.

Some people in India and many other countries cook without Onion and Garlic, that would not work for me. I think they are the backbone of the dish, adds that punch of flavours.

So your sauce is done now, whatever you want to add in it go ahead. For example you are adding mixed vegetables to the sauce, boil the vegetables as they will take longer to cook. Otherwise you can add them straight to the pan raw in the sauce and cook for like half an hour and check everything is cooked properly.

What can you put in your sauce?

Pretty much anything you like to eat. You can add prawns,vegetables and meat. I pretty much eat vegetables so I will share some tips.

Vegetables

Veggies are super easy, depending on what you are using methods will be a little bit different.

If you are cooking carrots,potatoes they need to be cooked properly and it takes longer for them, compared to other vegetables like mushrooms they cook really quickly.

Let’s make it simple, your sauce is ready and when you are adding your main ingredients of the dish to the sauce cook them separately and add to the sauce.

It’s a trial and error, you figure it out as you gain more experience cooking different dishes.

For example, if am cooking peas and mushrooms in the sauce I made. I will add peas 20 minutes before I add mushrooms. So the mushrooms only need 5 minutes to cook then turn the gas off and put the lid on and let steam do it’s magic.

Legumes

All the legumes look very similar, but they all taste different when cooked and they all have their own benefits. It’s important to soak the legumes like chickpeas, beans etc. overnight as they soak the water and double in size.

These legumes are very cheap to buy and makes a big batch for couple of bucks. You can get a bag of 1 kg chickpeas for $4 and you only need to use half the bag for one batch that will make a batch with 8–10 meals.

Legumes take longer to cook as some of them are very hard and definitely need to be soaked to cook quicker. Using a pressure cooker speeds up the process for me. The cooking that used to take several hours in the pot, is completed in an hour with the pressure cooker. The steam that’s locked in the cooker cooks everything properly.

Stay tuned, if you want some more recipes as this article is just a general run around the process of cooking any dish. I will be writing about individual dishes with proper ingredients and simple cooking times and techniques.