Indian meals are not only delicious but also nutritious with all the essential vitamins and mineral salts. Though the term Indian meals is used to refer to the wide variety of meals that is relished for breakfast, lunch and dinner, it generally would mean the full meals taken during lunch time and occasionally during dinner time. The varieties for breakfast are lighter and easily digestible. They have less number of items when compared with full meals taken during lunch time.

In the full Indian meals that are eaten for lunch there are at least ten varieties of dishes. The foods served during lunch will have food items of all the tastes and flavors, salty, sweet, spicy, hot and creamy. You will have these items served in small bowls and you can mix them to your choice. White rice and chapattis are the main course. In the western meals you have the foods served in multiple courses but in other Indian meals they are all served at once and this is called as thali. When you go to hotels you can order either North Indian thali or South Indian thali.

The North Indian thali would have wheat based foods like chapathis, parathas, vegetable subjis, pickles, curd and rice. In the South Indian thali, you have rice as the main course and other gravy items like sambar, rasam, pulikuzhambu, morkuzhambu, poriyal, koottu, pickles, papad, salt, payasam, banana, sweet and even beeda or pan are served. Just by ordering a full thali you can have sumptuous lunch.

In the Indian meals you have balanced combination of flavors. You have both non-vegetarian thalis and vegetarian thalis. Hot chutney and creamy chicken are served along with the Indian bread varieties called as poori, naan or roti. The starch food like rice or chapatti is the main meal of all Indian meals and they go with some kind of chutney and vegetable curries.

Preparing full Indian meals at home is time consuming and so not all the varieties are prepared at all the times. Usually rice is taken with sambar, rasam, curd, papad and poriyal. If you are a beginner you need to gather all the different Indian spices and herbs needed for cooking the Indian meals. You would need ajowan, amchur, bay leaf, celery seed, chat masala, cumin, cloves, cardamom, asafetida, curry leaves, cumin, cinnamon, coriander, chilly, paprika, kali mirch or black pepper, fenugreek, saffron, sambar masala, tamarind and turmeric. Together with these items you need edible oils, flour items, pulses, grains and sooji.

Prepare a menu before you start to cook. This will save your time considerably. Most of the dishes require oil cut into pieces for cooking them. If you are making kootu and poriyal then you may cut the onion together and divide among them instead of cutting them separately for each one of the item. This will save your time and make your work easier. If you plan properly preparing Indian meals would be both interesting and less time consuming.

Article Posted By : Sumazla  On January 04, 2012lView All Articles

Suhaina Mazhar is a freelance content writer and blogger with five years experience in content writing. http://sumazla.blogspot.com is her blog.

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Keywords :
Indian Meals , indian cuisine , indian food