Efficient Meal Planning | Pregnancy Diaries

Hello there!

After I published my Fifth Month Baby Shower Post on my Blog, which was supposed to be a formal announcement of our pregnancy, I received tons of congratulatory messages and comments, and was showered with a lot of love! Honestly, we are overwhelmed with your love! However, many of you went ahead asking for recipes of all that I cooked and even patted my back for cooking all that in a few hours.

Take my word, with a little bit of planning, everything becomes easy. So in this Blog Post, I will be sharing the simplest version of all that I cooked along with some tips, so that you too can plan your own meals when you have sudden guests at home, or simply when you are in a mood for a lavish home-cooked feast.

A small disclaimer before we begin, this is not a typical recipe post where I am sharing the ingredients and proportions separately. You can reach out to me on INSTAGRAM or on the comments section of my Blog for that. This is just an efficient meal planning blog post, so as to give you an idea of how everything was made possible in a few hours.

Coming back to the Menu for my Fifth Month Baby Shower, it was

• Basmati Rice with ghee
• Arhar Daal
• 5 types of vegetable fries (Potato, Cauliflower, Brinjal, Bitter Gourd, and Pumpkin)
• Shukto
• Mutton Curry
• Nolen Gurr er Paayesh/Kheer (a sweet pudding with jaggery, that is typically cooked on happy occasions in every Bengali household)

Meal Preparation

• Assume that we have all the ingredients handy in the kitchen for cooking the above mentioned dishes. Check the kitchen pantry a night before and make a mental note of what you do not have and what you absolutely cannot do without! Assign someone to get them next morning.
• Soak both the Basmati Rice and Arhar Daal separately as soon as you make up and enter the kitchen. This makes the cooking time faster and you end up saving fuel.
• Meanwhile start cutting the vegetables for shukto and bhaja. Cutting the vegetables for shukto ended up consuming a lot of time. For bhaja, cut the vegetables in smaller pieces and keep them separately by smearing them with salt and turmeric.
• Time to focus on the mutton curry. Slice onions. Have ginger and garlic peeled beforehand. Grated the ginger, both for mutton curry and daal tadka. Marinate mutton with salt, turmeric, mustard oil, red chilly powder and keep it in the fridge (I don’t use curd).
• I have a two burner gas stove and I started off with the Nolen Gurr er Paayesh. I boiled milk on a heavy bottomed pan by reducing the flame and kept stirring it till it reduced. I took out a portion of the milk for shukto and reserve it. On the other stove, I boiled the daal (which took very little time since it was soaking since morning). Leave the daal to cool.
• By now, the paayesh was almost done. Added in jaggery, raisins, cashew, and some gobhindobhog rice (a fragrant variety of rice) that I had soaked separately for the paayesh. For Paayesh, I followed the recipe by Bong Eats.
• Next I added a tadka to the daal, consisting of a bay leaf, dried red chilli, cumin seeds, hing, ginger paste, chopped tomatoes. Seasoned with sugar, salt and turmeric powder. So we have our arhar daal and paayesh ready by now.
• Next we move on to the mutton curry, that takes up a lot of time, specially since mutton requires time to get tender. The mutton has been marinating for quite a while. So on one hand, I pressured cooked the mutton curry and on the other stove, I am boiling the basmati rice that has been soaking for quite a long time. I keep an eye on both, since the rice needs to be perfectly cooked. The rice obviously cooks faster than the mutton. So once the rice is done and the starch is drained, I move on to five types of vegetable fries. Remember they have been smeared with turmeric and salt beforehand.
• Now this will require all your attention because I need crispy fries. Maa tells me “dhaka diye boshe por” (Cover the kadhai and cook), but I love my fries crispy and it is not everyday that I make them. So I start frying the vegetables and goyna bori, one by one, patiently, waiting for that perfect crispy texture.
• Once that is done, I move on to the star of the meal, Shukto. Maa helped me with this. Shukto is a typical Bengali vegetable dish that has a plethora of vegetables in it, namely, pumpkin, broad beans, sweet potato, brinjal, pointed gourd, drumsticks, bitter gourd, bori (dried lentil dumplings), green banana/plantain, and the list is basically exhaustive! You can add anything and everything into it! Shukto is seasoned with lots of ghee and milk, and is sweet in nature.
• In the kadhai that I fried the vegetables, I add some more mustard oil into it and fried the vegetables for shukto. Next I start making the shukto in the same kadhai and add the boiled milk that we had reserved for it. In case you want the complete recipe for shukto or mutton curry, please feel free to let me know or you may even google the way I did.
• Shukto requires a special masala called randhuni. Make sure you have it ready beforehand. Shukto is also incomplete without bori/fried lentil dumplings. Make sure you dry them separately while frying the vegetables.
• By now the mutton curry is complete and the whistles have gone off the cooker. It has cooled down and all you see is kosha mangsho ready to be devoured!
• Slice the gondhoraaj lebu, smear some ghee on the rice. Final touches are important!

And yes, in between all this, I have even managed to wash a few dishes sitting on the kitchen sink (atleast the mixer grinder jar, the tadka pan, spoons and ladles that were used). Heavy bottomed pans and cookers were washed later on! (Remember we are a maid free household and manage it on our own, hence there is no point putting things to do later).

Trust me, if you follow these simple tips and tricks, you will never fall behind your schedule. I did take ample rest while the daal was boiling or the shukto was being cooked. But yes, keep an eye on the flame and keep checking. Nothing feels better than to invest your love and energy into cooking things you relish, and that was all I did.

If my efforts are worth a share, do share it with anyone who might find this useful. If you have any feedback, do feel free to let me know. I look forward to constructive criticism and suggestions from my Blog readers.

Will keep posting more updates on my Blog. I hope you all are enjoying the posts.

Love, Sanandita.