Save money. Save time. Save waste.
Batch cooking is a fantastic way of ensuring a healthier and cheaper way of eating. It involves preparing all of your meals for the week, or even the month, in one go. This means that you have healthy meals available to hand after a long day at work, rather than reaching for a supermarket ready-meal or a takeaway for you and your family. Planning your food also means you waste less produce, since you use up all of the ingredients that you bought for a specific recipe, rather than odd ingredients here and there, bought for individual meals.
The use of the freezer is very helpful when batch cooking, in order to maintain variety in meals and enable as much forward planning as possible. Some recipes, like pies and lasagnes, can be taken up to the step before placing it in the oven, and then frozen, to be cooked through when needed. Other recipes, like curries and stews, should be cooked all the way through, cooled completely, and then frozen, to be re-heated when needed.
BATCH COOKING TIPS:
• Freezing things in individual portions can be very useful if you are cooking for 1 or 2 more frequently.
• Check the freezing times for individual ingredients.
• Check what can be frozen.
• Vegetarian recipes will keep longer than recipes containing meat.
• Always safely de-frost
• Re-usable food bags allow for more efficient storage opportunity than freezer-safe boxes. Just try to freeze the full bags flat so they can be stacked neatly.
• Get rid of the air in reusable food bags before sealing to create more space in your freezer.
• Scale up the recipe if you can so you have lots of portions.
• Think about the re-heating of food and if an ingredient is supposed to be eaten cold, then don’t add this to the recipe until you’re ready to serve.
• Label everything clearly as all meals starts to look the same when frozen!
• If you have a big enough freezer, freeze things like lasagnes in a freezer-safe oven proof dish, to make it easier to reheat.
