In Gulf countries bachelors need to cook for health and to save money. Time is a limiting factor for cooking. So most of them rely on short cut methods in cooking. A shortcut method of cooking delicious multivitamin, with balance nutrients curry very common in South India known as Sambar is given below.
Ingredients:
Carrot, Okra (Ladies Finger), Potato, Tomato, Tamarind, Onion, Curry Leaf, Dal, Asafoetida, Mustard, Fenugreek, Chilli powder, Turmeric powder, Coriander powder, Sambar powder, Green chilli, Dal.
Preparations:
Before sleeping you can chop potato, okra, carrot, green chilli and onion into small piece and put it inside a pan or vessel and keep it inside the fridge overnight. At the same time, you can cook Dal using a pressure cooker and keep the cooked Dal in a pan and keep inside the freezer overnight.
Cooking:
We can start cooking next day morning. Add sufficient water and a small piece of asafoetida to the vegetable mix and start cooking using the left burner. At the same time take a pan, add oil, mustard and fenugreek. Turn the flame down and add slices of onion. When it turns brown, cut the frozen dal as per the requirement and put it in the pan. Keep the balance frozen dal inside the freezer so that it can be used later. After sometime, the frozen dal dissolve with oil. Mean time the vegetables are all half cooked with thick soup solution is formed. Pour the soup solution into the mustard dal mixture. Put sufficient salt, add turmeric powder, chilli powder and coriander powder. Mix it thoroughly forming a thick paste. Switch of the burner and transfer the paste into the vegetable mix solution. Add tamarind solution as per the requirement. After boiling the mixture for few minutes, add little ready made sambar powder, finally put the curry leaves and now the sambar is ready so that we can use it to eat with dosa, idli or rice as you like.
The taste of sambar is based on the soup that is formed by half cooking. Never over cook the vegetables as that can lead to losing of valuable vitamins. Remember the soup is formed as a result of chemical reactions from the content of the vegetables.