The weekly grocery shopping is a ritual that I love. Walking down the aisles looking at the hundreds of items always makes me think about how I can use them in my cooking. More often than not, a short trip becomes a long drawn one with me stopping in every aisle, picking up some items, checking out the nutrition labels, comparing prices!
Another observation, a correctly done grocery shopping for me involves a ton of walking! 😀 At one point when I was really busy to get out for even a short evening walk I had converted the shopping ritual into a catching-up-with-my walking-for-the-day ritual. Except that the progress was really slow, I could still cover a fairly large number of step count. To those of you who might be wondering what I might be talking about – I believe that every step literally counts. So the smallest change I can think of to being healthy is probably walking a little bit more in our daily lives. Be it getting off a train stop earlier, taking the stairs instead of elevator, walking to get a glass of water instead of asking someone or just taking short breaks from work and doing a quick walk down the corridor. Along with that a slightly bigger change might be keeping track of what we eat. It is amazing how oblivious we are to this fact! And then probably making some changes to what we eat! I don’t want to scare people off with the healthy talk :), so I should probably get to the recipe quickly!
Anyway one confusing part about grocery shopping is choosing the veggies. I want something that is easy to cook, healthy, can be made into a colorful tasty side or main dish and I need a different veggie every meal! I do try to mix and match to keep it interesting. One time I just ended up getting a frozen bag of mixed veggies because I had no idea what to cook for some day! I know frozen veggies are not that great but sometimes I try to give a bit of leeway and go ahead and grab those! I tried to take a different direction with these recipe and cooked the veggies in a white gravy sauce with very mild pepper seasoning. It tasted amazing!
Ingredients
- 500 grams chopped mixed veggies (I used a frozen bag of beans, carrots, peas and corn – You can use any veggies!)
- 3/4 cup milk
- 2 tbsp wheat flour
- 3/4 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp coarsely ground black pepper
- 1 tsp oil
Preparation Time: 10 min
Cooking Time: 15 min
Servings: 2-3
Method
- Because I used frozen cut veggies I did not have any preparation to do! If you are using fresh veggies, chop them into bite-sized pieces.
- Take a small pan on the stove. Add 1/2 tsp oil. Once it is hot, add the wheat flour and saute well. You want it to just change color lightly. Be careful as slightly overcooking can give it a burnt taste. Take the roasted flour on a plate.
- In the same pan, add the veggies, some water, salt to taste and 1/2 tsp oil and let the veggies cook. Be careful to not burn the veggies, if required add some more water to cook the veggies.
- Once the veggies are almost done, add the milk and flour into a mixing bowl and mix it well so that there are no lumps.
- Add this milk-flour mixture to the pan in which veggies are cooking. Give everything a good mix. You will see the mixture thickening quickly. Keep mixing well to prevent the gravy from sticking too much to the pan and burning.
- Once the gravy is of the required consistency. Turn off the heat. Sprinkle the ground pepper and give it a final mix. I love to add the pepper at the end as I feel it gives a fresh feel to the dish! Serve hot as the gravy thickens on cooling. In case you want to reheat, just add a little milk or water to dilute the gravy to whatever consistency you like! I just used the sauce to bind the veggies and not like a gravy!
