The One Big Dish gives you two complete nights off cooking, but it's also the most freezer-space-hungry option and it restricts your choices to one-pot dishes with cooked veg only. So the next trick up your sleeve is to make more of the main bit of the meal, which is usually the schleppy bit. This takes up half the space in your freezer, and then you only have to make the sides that go with it. (The next post or two will be about Lazy Sides and Lasting Salads, so that even there you're streamlining your cooking.)
Step one: Eye up your repertoire
Again, I'll give suggestions, but think through your own cooking repertoire first, of dishes that you really like and know how to make. The less cooking you have to do, the more energy you'll have to explore new recipes, but first let's get to the point where you have that energy freed up already. So as before, we're starting from where we are and with what we have. For main-dish things that will freeze well, think of dishes that are...
- wet food - things in liquid or already a sauce
- sealed food - all kinds of bakes
- cooked through - veg and greens generally need to be cooked before they go in the freezer
- usually nice the next day - if your noodle soup turns to slushy-string soup overnight, it's not going to freeze happily
This time, though, you're not looking at your self-contained meals. Think of things you usually serve with sides - with mash, boiled potatoes, rice, bread, vegetables, salad, etc. So brainstorm that list, and also think about which things you considered for the One Big Dish but dismissed because they needed sides. Next, to make this really rewarding, look through that list for dishes that are...
- schleppy to prep - quite a bit of chopping, several different stages, a range of spices, etc. Bolognese definitely ticks that box. All curries do. Baked salmon is actually dead easy to prepare, you just smear on its topping and bung it in the oven, so I wouldn't bother freezing that.
- time-consuming to cook - anything that wants plenty of simmering time or oven time. This is a triple winner because a) dishes like that usually do better in the freezer anyway, as they're flavour-developers like stews and curries; b) it's more environmentally friendly to use the same gas / electric energy for several meals; c) they're often less work, because the oven is doing most of that work. Lamb foreshanks slow-cooked in red wine is an absolute winner for this.
As I said, start with your own repertoire if you can, so that you're already cooking less and have more kitchen energy before you start exploring new recipes. But if you want some ideas, here are main-bit dishes that I'll always make more of to pop some in the freezer:
- bolognese: My absolute go-to, which I make a vast VAT of, which can then become spaghetti bolognese, lasagna, chilli con carne, cottage pie, balti keema (more about that here)
- chilli con carne, served with rice and veg: Even though I started with a readymade bolognese, I make extra so the leftovers can be refrozen to become nachos or tortilla fillings
- sausage stews, served with mash and maybe veg (my favourites are Delia's apple cider and sausage and her juniper sausage stew)
- all curries, served with rice/naan and kachumber (salad of finely chopped tomato, shallots, coriander, etc)
- all dahls, served with rice/naan and maybe some fresh greens stirred through, eg baby spinach
- lamb foreshanks in red wine: I cook 8 at a time, which cooks better anyway, and freeze them in pairs for the two of us (lamb foreshanks are a perfect size for one person, a full shank is always too much - they're not always the easiest to find, so ask at the butcher's counter)
- Jamie's roast lamb with aubergine, freezing the lamb slices in the aubergine-tomato sauce, serve with potatoes (boiled or roast or hasslebacks) and freshly fried-up garlic kale
- any pasta sauce: my favourite is Rachel Roddy's sausagemeat and red pepper sauce
- sauce for Spanish Stuffed Marrow: with that done, all you need to do is source, bisect, and deseed your marrow, and if you've missed the last marrow of the season, it also makes a great pasta sauce
- Thai Green Curry, depending on what veg I've put in it - if it's just chicken, that freezes perfectly; mange tout will just about cope; water chestnuts are happy; bean sprouts don't much like the freezer.
- Rachel Roddy's caponata, a Sicilian aubergine-and-bits explosion of flavour, served with bread (or possibly lamb foreshanks in red wine!) - delicious but a real Cooking Event, so I always make plenty
- Doro wat, an Ethiopian chicken stew, served with two hardish-boiled eggs in each dish and bread
- Brazilian black bean stew, the veggie one from Leon, served with nutty brown rice
- Vegetable bakes like pommes dauphinoise, potato and onion bakes, and jewel gratin, my slight adaptation of this recipe, served with peppery greens or a winter salad
Step Two: Make more of the main bit
Depending on the recipe, decide if you're going to make two, three, or four times the amount that usually serves your household. If there's loads of chopping and you usually find that time-consuming, maybe just make twice the amount this time round. If the prep is easy and the cooking time is usually the off-putting bit (I'm looking at you, foreshanks) then make loads. I'd usually do this on a week night, not as a big weekend cook, but I'd pick a night where I don't have anything else on and I probably wouldn't be cooking the night before or after. (You already have two nights off cooking from the One Big Dish rotation.)
Step Three: Observe portion sizes!
Pay close attention to how much actually gets eaten in a meal! It's often less than you think. Count the ladles of bolognese per person. Count the sausages per dish and if any are leftover. Hell, put the plate on the weighing scales before you add the main bit and check the actual weight! Write down how much you need per meal. When you're freezing food, it never looks like enough, especially if you're using square and rectangular tupperwares, which contain a lot more than they seem to.
As a rule of thumb, I allow 250ml per person for a dish that will get sides added and that works out between the two of us (I eat about half what Will does). The curry in the pic at the top is frozen in 250ml containers as I always defrost two different curries for a meal, so that's 2 x 250ml = 500ml of the main dish, to be served with rice and kachumber.
Step Four: Protect, Fridge, Label, and Freeze
As before, you want to get the food in the freezer, nicely labelled, as soon as possible - partly for food hygine, and partly because, without its side dishes, it's a lot more vulnerable to being accidentally hoovered up by a passing hungry person who's found a spoon. Anyone wandering around the kitchen with a spoon, if they're not cooking, is Up To No Good. Redirect them to the possibilities of bread / toast and fruit.
Now, depending on how much you made of The Main Bit, you have at least one night of very easy cooking, just defrost the main and add a side or two. Maybe two nights. Maybe even three. So the next post, because I'm steadily revealing what an unbelievably lazy cook I actually am, will be, naturally, Very Lazy Sides.