Cooking
Prepare Home Cooked Meals: Get into the kitchen and prepare your own meals this is one of the best ways to know exactly what you're putting in your mouth and also helps control your calorie intake.

Wine, when consumed in moderation, has been linked to several health benefits and can protect you against heart disease, diabetes, skin damage from UV rays, aging, cancer, weakening of bone-tissues and memory loss. Given its splendid taste, it has become a favorite in the culinary world as well.

Wine makes for a great swap for fattening butter and oils, commonly used to flavor food. But cooking with wine takes some amount of practice and experience, lest you should end up with a strong-tasting dish. Refer to our quick tips, before you start using wine in your kitchen:

  1. Know what quality to pick: Before you go ahead and purchase wine to use in a recipe, read the steps. If wine is the hero of the dish (for example, Coq au Vin), then go ahead and buy a lovely wine that’s good enough to drink. But if the recipe only needs you to deglaze the key ingredients with some wine, feel free to use leftover wine.
  2. Go for dry wines instead of the sweet ones: Cooking releases the sugar content in wine, making your food taste sweeter than you might like or expect. It’s best to opt for dry wine, which contains relatively less sugar, thus lending the perfect flavor to your food.
  3. Give it time to cook thoroughly: Wine, like all other alcohol drinks, takes its time to burn off. Hence, add it in the beginning with other ingredients, so that it has enough time to get cooked. Otherwise, you will end up with a dish that is soggy and/or overpowering. Simmering wine along with the food will enrich the flavor of your dish, and keep it moist.
  4. Use white wine in mild foods and red wine in spicy dishes: The tannins in red wine add bitterness, astringency and complexity in a dish that’s basically spicy. On the other hand, the acid in white wine enhances the flavors of mild dishes.
  5. Experiment with aromatic flavors: Some wines have distinct fruity or floral notes. Using them in your cooking will add a wonderful flavor dimension to complex, spicy dishes. Be sure not to add them to sweeter recipes.

Head to our Food section for healthy recipes and the latest food trends.
Find quick and easy Nutrition tips here.

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A graduate in English Literature, Shruti comes with a gamut of experience in academic freelance writing and television journalism. A strong believer of holistic living, she has always followed the mantra of “a healthy body and a happy mind”. Naturally then, it wasn’t long before she found herself inclined towards wellness and lifestyle. She now writes on these subjects in a professional capacity at Z Living. Her inherent curiosity about healthy living makes her a connoisseur of all things natural, and motivates her to share the knowledge through her writing.