Cooking in a jiffy

Yet another cooking website, one can legitimately groan.

So some caveats (I’m a trained lawyer after all!) should be in order.

First, this site wishes to catalogue only such recipes that you can rustle up at home with minimum equipment and fuss.

Secondly, while we all do enjoy gourmet cooking or exotic dishes once in a while, when we can afford them, this site wishes to focus on dishes, or rather meals that are nutritious and truly “Home style”.

This in India means rice or rotis, a dal, a vegetable or two and some times a meat dish, that we eat every day (yes, every day, I’m not lying!), for lunch as well as for dinner. So spicing would be minimalist, most of the time. This also implies that you can’t get the dal that I have in my home in any restaurant, dhaba or five star hotel, for love or for money. And that’s a challenge.
Most important, the meal would have to be rustled up, from scratch, in 30 minutes or so, lest it turns into a chore. So cooking time is family time with lots of cutting and washing and steaming and frying going on side by side with such planning and sequencing of operations that should put a Mission Mars to shame.

With this intro, let’s dig into this site that I dedicate to all those friends, relatives and acquaintances who have sampled my mom’s cooking either at my home or at my work place from my lunch-box.

I’m starting with Indian cooking, so that the fear of “cooking curries every day” (that my friends in University College London would so often comment) is banished for ever.

But to all others, who wish to contribute similar “home style” recipes from their part of the world, here’s a full throated invitation to come join us and make COOKING IN A JIFFY a world wide movement for home-style cooking that is nutritious and that celebrates family collaboration in cooking above every thing else.