5 hot tips to curry quicker without resorting to jars

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1. Use chips.
If I had more money, I would go to the chippie most evenings to skip the tedium of peeling and chopping potatoes for a family. I fry onions, garlic, ginger (see point 5) and spices, add tomatoes and then chips. They are the ready fried alu in alu matar, alu gobhi, alu baingan or in tomato and tamarind. Add the veg and continue to curry as you would, knowing the spices are being absorbed into those fat jackets each chip comes in.

2. Pressure cook everything.
I laugh at recipes telling me to hang about while meat, dal or potatoes soften. I mentally quarter the time they recommend, but more thorough instructions on how to use a pressure cooker are available...if you have the time. I also love that pressure cookers save gas.

3. Discover hing*.
A pinch of this added to cumin and mustard seeds sizzling in hot oil at the start of a curry goes some way to replacing the need for onion and garlic...and so a lot of chopping. I don't think it's intended as a time-saver spice but more to help those who avoid onion and garlic for religious reasons.

I am pretty relaxed about my children exploring things in the kitchen but I do have 2 rules: Don't touch fire and don't open the hing. It's not something I want getting ground into the lino and emitting its scent for evermore.

4. Eat pitta when you can't be bothered to roll rotis
Sorry to all the masis, phupis, khallas, chachis and other auntiyan who have encouraged me to make chapattis as if doing so is a moral virtue.

5. Use frozen garlic, ginger and chilli.
I agree a lot of things don't freeze well, but these are not bad. OK, they don't quite give the same depth of flavour or zing but it's great to be able to be able to get the lid on the pressure cooker after only five minutes of prep. Unfortunately, there are no short cuts to frying onions to make them worthy of any biriyani or handi I know of.

*What is hing?
This is a question I asked when I was 11, of Miss Prakash the Hindi teacher, to which she replied, "Asafoedita, beta," as if it has been a flavour of crisps displayed between cheese and onion and smoky bacon back where I had come from: Oxford, England. The previous year the stories I'd been reading in school were about St Giles Fair, where the children ate the same ice-creams and sausages that I ate. Not hing.

And now I couldn't even understand the title of Kabuli Hing Wallah in Bal Bharti (2), our 6th grade Hindi reader. Although I did eventually decode the story, I'm afraid I cannot remember what particular adventures unfolded when the Hing Wallah of Kabul brought his asafoedita to Kamala and Ram's house.

Maybe the adventure was simply smelling it.

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