With these tips, making tasty meals will be a breeze.
Build a core set of recipes
To make a quick meal it is important that you don’t have to think about it. By having a set of ten to twenty favourite recipes, you can quickly make what you like and have a wide variety.
Use fresh vegetables for taste
I think it is really essential to use fresh vegetables in a meal. Vegetables make the meal balanced; fresh vegetables simply taste so much better than the ones in tins or jars.
Don’t overcook
This may sound totally obvious, but cook the food for the shortest possible time. Many vegetables don’t need to be cooked at all. All you want is that they are hot and maybe slightly softened. They will taste at their best too. Overcooking your food takes longer and destroys the taste.
Add umami
Umami is a loanword from the Japanese which can be translated as “pleasant savory taste”, and it is one of the five basic tastes. Even after adding spices, nuts, etc., you may find the food is still not “tasty” enough. That means you need to add some umami. Ingredients that contain a lot of umami are dried tomatoes, dried mushrooms, hard cheese, miso, soy sauce, seaweed, garlic, and also beans (in particular fresh soy beans).
Think about texture
We appreciate food through more than the taste and smell. The way food feels when you eat it — smooth, crunchy, etc. — is equally important. Vegetables are great for texture, this is another reason not to overcook them. For extra crunch you can add seeds or nuts, for more “bite” dried mushrooms are great, for example.
Make a one-pot meal
Part of the difficulty with cooking is having to multitask with several pots on the hob. Making a one-pot main meal is much simpler and quicker, because you have only one thing to attend to.
Use the microwave
The microwave oven is much underrated for cooking. It has the advantages of preparing food quickly, preserving more of the nutrients, and it is hassle-free: you don’t have to watch it and there is less cleaning-up afterwards too.