How to spend less time planning and preparing meals, whilst still giving your family a healthy and varied menu.
We’ve all heard of batch cooking, right?
When you make 4 or 5 portions of a meal instead of just 1 then freeze the rest, to save time later in the month.
Great idea, and a real time saver in the kitchen, except for one issue...
You end up with such repetitive meal plans!
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to eat Spaghetti Bolognese every single week, and it doesn’t give the kids a very varied palette either.
There's nothing wrong with having family favourites, of course, but we can easily mix it up a bit with just a few simple tweaks…
Enter: VERSATILE Batch Cooking
The basic idea, is that you make a base recipe that can be used in a number of different ways.
A big batch of Chilli con Carne, for example, could be served as:
Chilli with rice
Chilli and baked potato
Stuffed peppers
A breakfast bowl with scrambled egg
A burrito bowl etc. etc.
A Bolognese sauce could be served as:
Spaghetti Bolognese
Lasagna
Stuffed peppers
Cottage pie
Minestrone soup
Add some different spices, beans and corn to turn it into a chilli
Add Indian spices to make a keema curry
Add Moroccan spices to make a Moroccan dish
So many different options, all from one session of cooking!
The work required to turn your dish into something else is minimal, meaning you can spend much less time in the kitchen and much more time with the kids or just relaxing (can you imagine?!)
But at the same time, you're keeping the menu varied which means no one gets bored with the same old meals each week and you're still introducing the kids to lots of new flavours.
This week I cooked up a big batch of Bolognese sauce and added a bunch of hidden veg to the sauce, to give it an extra boost of nutrients.
(Five, count ‘em, FIVE veggies packed into this bad boy).
It made enough for dinner last night, lunch today and FOUR freezer portions to make a bunch of different meals I’ve got planned, which I will demonstrate later in the month.
Click here for the recipe!