I have always liked cooking and I think I have spent a lot of my leisure time in the kitchen. I am definitely not a chef by profession or a great cook but just feel like any woman who has a special place in the heart for a beautiful home and a lovely family.

Well this part of my life has always been fascinating. I always liked housekeeping and cooking food for my family has been my heart. Probably, this gives a wonderful feeling of satisfaction of being a homemaker and a mother. It is indeed necessary to know a few things, because anyone would prefer to eat healthy and retain the nutritive value of the food material in the body. More so because, these days most farmers use a lot of pesticides and inorganic manure to multiply growth of the plants and reap the best.

Step I - The moment one thinks of cooking these days, with so much information in the air, one always tends to look into the nutritional aspects of cooking methods and spend a lot of time analyzing methods to retain the essential vitamins and minerals. According to science, many say our vegetables and some food products contain very essential minerals that tend to get washed away when you wash your foodstuff after cutting the veggies. These water-soluble minerals and vitamins get washed away when you put them in water. Hence, it is important that one washes them first and then gets ready to cook them.

Step II - Cooking on fire also causes loss of vitamins and minerals. To retain these, it is right to put them into hot water and then let it simmer on the stove for a while until it is cooked. Steaming also helps retaining a few of the essential minerals because you tend to close the vessel with a lid and the minerals mostly remain dissolved in the vessel you use.

Step III -   It is not wise to cook vegetables for long on the stove for example when you cook green leaves you tend to lose vitamin A and that is very essential in the leafy vegetable part. It is not wise to fry them straight away or heat them very often as the food loses its nutritive value.

This is exactly why most people prefer to cook daily, rather than cooking lots of a few dishes and retain them in the refrigerator for long. Some kinds of foods also lose their taste apart from the essential vitamins and minerals.

I hope some of these simple cooking methods are useful to you and would like to share some more if readers know more.