I realised over on Facebook that I bang on a lot about cooking and new recipes and how much I love it, but most of my friends who don't love it are doing a lot more cooking than I am. Some of them even have to cook, every night, which sounds dismal and exhausting. I cook maybe three times a week max (excluding breakfasts). Sometimes I don't cook for a week or two, because I just don't feel like it. And 95% of the time, we're eating food I made. I think that's why I get to keep on loving cooking: I only do it when I feel like it. (I've mentioned that before.) So I offered to write up some suggestions for my friends, they said Yes Please, and here you go! So that it works for everyone, I'll aim to include stuff for all dietary needs, all househould sizes, and all freezer-space permutations. If my suggestions don't cover your situation / needs, let me know in the comments (or on Fb, for those who know me) and I'll update it. This will be across several posts as various tricks come into play and you build up stores, but we'll start with the easiest entry-point:
One big dish
Step one: pick the winner
For the first weekend, this weekend if you have the ingredients, next weekend if you need some time to plan and shop, pick one one-pot dish that you really, really like. Something you usually serve just as it is, no sides required. (Maybe a side salad and/or some nice bread, but first try think of something that really is just one dish.) Think about...
- stews with veg in
- casseroles with veg in
- curries with veg in
- lasagne / pasta bakes (you guessed it, with veg in)
- tray bakes (eg tray of roast veg, mushroom & lentil bake, etc)
I'll add some suggestions and recipe links at the bottom for those of you who don't have a repertoire to draw on, but chances are if you're slaving away at the cooking mill every damn day then you have one or two recipes like this up your sleeve that you already know how to make and like.
All of those types of dishes are things that freeze well, because they have liquid or are kinda sealed-in. The bit about "with veg in" is crucial: we want a path to an easier life, not to scurvy! Don't include hard-boiled eggs in anything, mind - they turn to rubber in the freezer.
Step two: make three times the amount
Make enough to serve your household three times over. (If it's usually finished at a meal, make three times that amount. If it usually does two days running, multiply the recipe by 1.5) Yes, this will take you twice as long - but you're getting three times the amount of food. This is also why you're doing it on a weekend, or whatever is an easy day for you, rather than tired after a day's work. A few tips about cooking in bulk like this...
- Do it when you have the energy, in the morning or afternoon if that works for you. By definition this is food that reheats well, so it'll still reheat beautifully for the evening meal.
- Clear and clean the kitchen first so your cooking space is pleasant and calming. Set up a nice playlist, radio drama, or interesting household member to entertain you.
- Expect the chopping to take longer, because it's a larger quantity. As you cook in bulk more, your prep speeds will increase a lot and some things are easier to prep in bulk. (A head of garlic is way quicker than two cloves.)
- Use your widest frying pan or fry in batches. If your frying pan is two-inches deep in veg, it's going to boil more than fry, so if you have several different vegetables, you can fry each in turn before tossing them into their main pot.
- Bring out yer biggest pots and pans. For a tray of roast veg, you might want the roasting tray that comes with the oven. Big deep pots are the way forward. If you don't have big pots to go on the stove top, you can probably use a casserole dish and put it in the oven. As you start doing this more, you can start acquiring bigger pots and trays, I'll add info about that in later posts, but for now deploy what you have. If you end up needing to use two pots, that's fine.
Step three: protect the leftovers
Your dinner for tonight is prepped. The rest needs to be protected from two things: germs and other household members. To protect it from germs, cool it as fast as you can: pop it outside when the weather's cool (well covered) and get it in the fridge as soon as you can. (I usually do the freezing bit the next day after it's overnighted in the fridge.) To protect it from other household members, I dunno, threaten them with death or cooking or something. This is food for future meals. If people are bored or peckish, they can have bread or a piece of fruit. Getting it in the freezer fast will also prevent this kind of "evaporation".
Step four: freeze it in meal-sized portions
I have a whole blogpost about freezing hygiene and strategies, so I'll just recap the headlines here.
- Get the portions right: If you've made three times the usual amount, you just need to split the leftovers in two. As a rule of thumb, I allow 500ml per person if that's the only dish (eg a stew with veg and potatoes already in it), 250ml per person if it'll have sides added (eg a sausage stew that I'll make mash to serve with)
- Use square / rectangular tupperware: All those odd-shaped saved containers are wasting freezer space with their round sides and not stacking well. The Sainsbury's basics tupperware (in the freezing post) are perfect, come in very helpful sizes, and stack beautifully, both in the freezer and when they're empty. If you're short on freezer space, you can likely double your storage by using square / rectangular containers that stack well. Make sure it's filled up to about 1cm-5mm below the line. Less and you're wasting precious freezer space; more and the water-content will expand and knock the lid off.
- Label it with masking tape and a Sharpie: Write what the food is and the date that you're freezing it. (I used to write the number of portions, but now I know by the size)
If you're freezing bakes, you don't want your whole baking tray to disappear into the freezer and waste space. If I'm batch-making lasagnes, I do freeze them in their trays, because each tray is filled and I have enough of those trays to put them in the freezer. For other bakes, I fridge them so that they go nice and solid, then cut them into meal-portions and wrap each portion in tinfoil, like this:
The remaining three squares each get their own tinfoil wrapping. This will double up as their "baking tray" for when they're reheated.
Pinch the tinfoil together along the top of the bake and wrap the sides tightly. You want to keep any air out. You're closing it so that when you defrost it, it will be easy to unwrap from the top and pinch the sides of tinfoil down to make a little baking tray that contains it perfectly.
Step five: one now, one in the coming week, one next week
Tonight's dinner is sorted, because you just spent twice the time cooking. Later in the week, you can have a night off cooking, without having to eat the same thing twice in a row. Your cooking-time investment has now evened out. The next week, you get another night off, because you made three times the amount. But actually, if you do another One Big Dish next weekend, you'll get two nights off. You've now set up a pattern that one weekend morning / afternoon you do a big cook, and two nights that week you don't have to cook, and you never have to eat the same thing two days in a row.
That's the starting position and it's a damn good starting position. But as you get into the swing of things and start to expand your repertoire, your tricks, and your cookpot sizes, it becomes increasingly easy to cook four or five times the amount and also to vary the types of things that go into the freezer. For example, some of the things currently in my freezer (we're two people) are...
- tavas (Cypriot stew): 1 litre portions, eat as is for a non-cooking night
- ratatouille: 1 litre portions, eat as is for a non-cooking night
- sausage & apples in cider stew: 500ml portions, just make some mash to serve with it
- jewel bake: 500g portions, just add some packet greens (eg rocket & watercress) and a salad dressing
- golden-egg curry paste, 250g: fry up with a can of coconut milk and poach some eggs in it, serves two with bread
- jalfrezi mix, 250g: fry up with some defrosted frozen prawns for instant prawn jalfrezi, serves 3 with rice (one dinner for two, one lunch for me)
- chermoula paste: add to chicken thighs, baby potatoes, baby tomatoes, and quartered red onions to make a massive 6-portion tray bake with 10-min prep time
- mash, 500ml portions: for when we want a sausage stew and can't be arsed to even make mash
- doro wat, 500ml portions: add two hard-boiled eggs per person and serve with bread
- mushroom & lentil bake: 500g portions: serve on some baby spinach, maybe with spicy tomato sauce
- spicy tomato sauce, 250g portions: left over from the last time I made mushroom & lentil bake or maybe from a French-toast brunch
For now, for your One Big Dish, you're replicating the top two I listed - totally non-cooking nights, the Dish is the Dish and the whole of the Dish. That takes up the most freezer space, but for two people that's still only 1 litre, which is 10cm cubed, which is not masses of space. And when all the other options gradually make their way into play, even a modest above-the-fridge freezer shelf can hold a week's worth of barely-cooking-at-all options. If you're a large household / one with hungry-hippo teenagers, then dishes where you add sides like mashed potatoes / salad / bread will make the most sense, and you can start this week by supplementing your One Big Dish with some tasty bread. (The ready-to-bake baguettes always feel more of a dinner treat than the sliced stuff, and keep well in a cupboard.) Or mash or rice if bread doesn't suit. If you're one person and just have a freezer compartment, buy 250-ml tupperwares and you can fill that space with two weeks' worth of food. I'll add lots more ideas for the other strategies, beyond the One Big Dish, but that seems the easiest place to start. (I'll add lots more strategies a lot faster if you enthuse about this and ask questions and say "But we're feeding seven people including a Viking and a Bear and three of our number are gluten-free" etc etc)
Ideas for One Big Dish
If you don't have your Go-To dish, here are some suggestions of recipes I've already blogged...
- ratatouille: vegan, dairy-free, gluten-free
- mushroom & lentil bake: vegetarian, gluten-free
- kedgeree actually kichiree: vegan / vegetarian, gluten-free
- aubergine, olive, and sausage stew: meat-eating, gluten-free (buy the "jellied" chicken stock that Knorr does for a nice stock)
- lots lasagne: meat-eating
I've learnt a ton more recipes in the time since I was last blogging regularly, so I'll add more plenty more suggestions, but let's start from where we are and with what we have, eh? And if you need help or the above suggestions don't work for you for whatever reason, tell me and I'll add more!
Forgot to add: Defrosting!
The best and most food-safe way to defrost things is to pop them in the fridge the night before. That way it defrosts slowly and never rises above the temperature in the fridge (generally below 8° C), so it never reaches the room temperatures where baddies can breed. (There's more about food safety and temperatures in the freezing post.) So that's absolutely what you should do. Or if you have a microwave, those have defrost options, so that's sorted.
I don't have a microwave and I do have some tricks for when I forget, which aren't official food-safety advice. If the radiators are on, I pop the tupperware / tinfoil package on a plate on the radiator. If they're not, and the food's in a tupperware, I pop it in some warm water almost up to the rim of the tupperware (not more, I don't want the water getting into the food). If it's hot summer weather, I put the food on a metal tray in the sun so that it's getting heated underneath as well as on top by the sun's rays (mimicking one of those fancy defrosting plates). In all these cases, you don't want the food to reach full room temperature like that - room temperature is the dodgy one, remember. Whichever I'm doing, the plan is to let the outside defrost enough that I can peel off the tinfoil / tip it out the tupperware, and then heat it in the oven or in a pot above 65°C. If it's a sauce or wet food like a stew / casserole, I'll stir it in the pot / oven every 10 mins or so to help the clumps break up