My name is Lavina Masand Mehra. I am a Finance and Management professional and have been associated with international humanitarian work for the last 25 years. Since my childhood I have strived to learn new things and lived through my motto that “life is too short”. With my family, I have lived an interesting life in different parts of the world. Each country offered unique and exciting opportunities and challenges that made our family learn a lot of new things.

I have launched this website to share my ideas to make day to day routines quicker, easier, economical, and swift so that time and energy can be saved. Over the years, I have noticed so many of my friends, family and acquaintances spend enormous amount of time in the kitchen to lay a delicious and nutritious meal on the table. To add to this, it hurts when one considers the amount of fuel energy used in time consuming cooking methods like oven cooking where you may be simply roasting nuts for a minimum of 45 minutes. The carbon footprint these cooking methods and appliances leave on the environment seem sinful to me. I am starting the discussion with kitchen ideas that can save both time and energy in terms of oven use. I strongly believe that time saved can, and should, be translated into maximizing quality family time and the energy conserved can make the earth greener and a better place for our future generations.

To start off, I am primarily sharing some recipes and tips to lay a meal on the table that is cooked fast, nutritious, green and delicious. However, I don’t want to limit myself to the kitchen and write only recipes or cooking tips as I really don’t claim to be the best cook. I would rather love to be recognized as an efficient cook. I feel that having an extremely busy professional and personal life for all these years, there were so many things that I had to do swiftly to balance different priorities and at the same time maximize quality time to spend with the family. There might be some thoughts from these experiences that might be worth sharing and may be useful for friends and readers of this site. I would like to keep the option open of sharing those thoughts at some point of time. So, stay tuned.. more will be coming soon, maybe everyday on this website.

To find out more about my initial thoughts on setting up this project, read my post about finding myself.

Read this for an overview of my basic concepts of Quick Cooking, Healthy Eating.

Here are the posts about each of those four basic concepts:

• Quick Ingredients
• Right Tools
• Swift Method
• Creativity

Please provide any feedback, thoughts, comments, opinions, or advice about my project through my Facebook page Four Steps or Less!