Living on the cheapest available food would be very unhealthy. Rice, beans and vegetables are a better source of food. "Start by investing in a rice cooker, if you don't have one.". I've read above text from Paul Graham (Ramen Profitable essay[1]) at 2009.
His advise was very useful for me in last semester at university. After I moved to university campus, I had to cook for myself. I bought a rice cooker and I was using beans and vegetables a lot. At the same time, it was another easy, cheap and common food available for students: "Instant Noodles". Please don't use this type of food often and instead of that try to cook something healthy like "Celery stew".
As I am in holiday at home with my family. I've decided to learn some new recipe from my mom. My mom's cooking is the best (and famous) between our friends and relatives. I've asked many times from her about her secrets in cooking, she is always answering me with the detailed recipe. Let's use my mom's recipe for cooking celery stew and see how much you may enjoy ;-)
- Rice
- Oil
- Yellow onions
- Fresh Celery
- Red meat or chicken or mushroom (form left to right is better to use)
- Red chili, salt and turmeric (turmeric is for changing food's color, Saffron can be use instead of that too but it is much more expensive)
- Sour water
First put rice in rice cooker. Add water as specified on rice cooker. Add salt and a little bit of oil if you want to. Turn on rice cooker now and forget about it (Ideally rice and celery stew would be ready at same time, but usually celery stew takes more time to cook).
- Cut and fried the onions until their color changed to bright yellow.
- Add small pieces of celery plus it's leafs (Celery stalk should be between 1.5 cm to 2.5 cm. Wash and chop chop celery leafs before adding). Fried celery for 4 to 6 minutes (until the green color of leafs became darker).
- Add pieces of meat and fried them until they changed the color too (not cooked neither row).
- Add nearly twice as much as all of the food water to the container. Or add water until it cover food plus 5cm above it.
- Add red chili, salt and turmeric.
- Then increase the fire level to high to boil the water until it lost half of it.
- Add a little by little sour water and taste the food.
- Decrease the fire level to low and wait for food to cook slowly.
That's all, when celeries are soft and nice to eat, you could eat the celery stew with the rice.
Enjoy the food and share your feedback :-)
P.S. if you are using Saffron then it's better to add it at the end (after #8).
