Cook Easily with Quick Meal Recipes!

20-minute recipes never really take 20 minutes do they? They often come with a disclaimer that they take 20 minutes to cook (not including prep work and washing up), or they just take much longer in practice because they take too many laborious or quite involved steps to complete. 

So, if we want to fit nutritious food into our schedules, we've got to strip out as many parts that take time as possible. We want to use as few utensils as possible, and use as few sequential cooking steps as possible.  

Recently, I made a really quick meal that barely took 15 minutes to cook, with minimal prep, and a really quick wash.

It's rice with roast pork and mixed vegetables (the frozen, cubed kind with carrots, peas, green beans and corn)

I didn't make the roast pork myself - it was leftovers. 

Here's the recipe! 

Recipe:

1.    Prepare rice for cooking in a rice cooker. I use the ratio of 1.5 cups of water to each cup of rice, but it varies with climate and the type of rice. If you try cooking rice a few times, you'll notice whether your rice is too wet or too dry and can adjust accordingly

2.    Before cooking the rice, place frozen mixed vegetables and roast pork on top of the rice, so that it can steam. Both have already been cooked, so it's really just to heat it up a little. 

3.     Season the dish! You can add a pinch of salt (I would say that for about 150g of frozen mixed vegetables and 200g of roast meat literally just a pinch would be enough) or some pepper to taste (enough so that you can visbly see evenly distributed pepper on top with plenty of gaps). 

But really, because the roast meat is typically already salty enough, and as it steams some of the fat will render onto the rice and give it a great flavour, there's not much seasoning that needs to be done here.

4.    Turn on the rice cooker and set it to "cook", and wait for the rice to be done! 

This really was a 20-minute meal - 15 minutes to actually cook it, and 5 minutes at the end, just to wash a couple of things.  

   

  Is it really home cooking?

 Yes! Cooking at home isn't some kind of speedrun 100% challenge. I took whatever ingredients I could find in the fridge and made something tasty and at least somewhat nutritious.

   

 

 The frozen mixed vegetables were processed and pre-cooked, and leftover roast meat from the freezer is roast meat, but it isn't packaged instant food laden with preservatives, stabilisers and seasonings. 

By the way, Watties' frozen mixed vegetables is a great product I like to keep stocked all the time.

Takeaway

1.     I think home cooking really is about making something sufficiently nutritious that you can enjoy eating with what you have on hand. 

2.    For that matter, leftovers are useful! This can be leftover cooked foods - each time you go, buy more from that hawker center stall and set it aside! Or, it can be leftover raw food - half an onion or carrot or a chicken part you'll use the next day - anything to throw in.

3.     Meals that don't need supervision are your best bet - so get a rice cooker, maybe even a steamer or electric crock pot. 

4.    What takes up time? It's the preparation stage - things like chopping and washing vegetables, cutting meat and so on. They need both extra time to do, and extra time to wash-up later.

5.    I try to make use of interstitial time, such as time when my rice or soup is cooking, to just reflexively prepare for my next quick meal. For instance, those 15 minutes for cooking rice were used to wash a head of broccoli for next time! If you can: a. reflexively stock and prepare -> b. use whatever you reflexively prepared, rinse and repeat, you'll always be ready to make something great for yourself.

7.     Home cooking doesn't have to be Pinterest-ready. It doesn't even have to be perfectly clean and tidy! 

Go on, pick something from your fridge and try it out!