Grandma's Cooking Tips

While working in kitchen we should be able to handle cooking materials wisely. This wisdom comes from experience.

Grandma is sharing some simple and useful cooking tips for you all.

1. When cooking rice for lemon rice or cumin rice add a tsp of lemon juice or 1/2 tsp cooking oil to get clump free rice.

2. Add few dry neem leaves into rice box to keep away rice insects.

3. To get easy and good digestion always cook lentils to soft. Soak daal/lentil in hot water for 15 minutes before keeping it in pressure cooker.

4. When you wash raw rice, collect the water and use this rice water to cook daal/lentil. This helps daal to cook more soft and fast too.

5. Another tip to cook soft daal is, add little turmeric powder into daal container. This gives extra good fragrance too.

6. For longer-term storage of all purpose flour (maida) use a Ziploc bag and keep it in freezer.

7. Keep few neem leaves (dried) at the bottom of any flour container to keep moisture away.

8. Dry tulsi leaves and store in a container. Evening hours you can use it as essence to keep mosquitoes away.

9. When you are preparing chapati, roti, parata – mix flour well ahead and leave it in a closed container for about an hour or two. This will give you soft chapati or roti.

10. Do not store spices and condiments closes to heating source. Heat will reduce masala effect and food tastes won’t be good.

11. To keep green chillis in its original color- store them in a bottle with little turmeric powder.

12. To reduce burning sensation in palms, after cutting or grinding green chillis, rinse hand with little lemon juice or sugar water or tamarind water.

13. To remove tea and coffee marks in cups or utensils, apply salt and wash and, rinse in water.

14. While preparing clarified butter or ghee – add half leaf of beetle leaf. This will give fragrance and crystal appearance to ghee.

15. To remove odd smell in opened butter – daily rinse butter in cold water and store in fresh water.

16. To avoid blackening of egg plant, plantain pieces – add little butter milk or lemon juice to water and transfer the cut pieces to this mix water.

17. Apply little oil on your palms to avoid blackening of palms while cutting jackfruit, plantain or brinjal.

18. When you store vegetables inside fridge, store them in different containers/bags inside refrigerator.

19. Add 1/4 tsp of raw rice at base of salt dispenser to avoid moisture development .

20. Rolling lemons hard under your palm helps to break down the fibers and makes it more easy to squeeze and, you will be able to extract more juice from lemons.

Image credit: Photo by Angele J from Pexels