Some meals can be cooked directly from frozen and others need to be defrosted first. Full instructions on the various ways of defrosting meals can be found here, but the simplest way is simply to transfer it from the freezer to the fridge the evening before you want to serve it and leave to defrost slowly overnight.
NO-COOK MEALS
Throughout this book you will see no-cook meals – these are meals that are assembled from entirely uncooked or frozen ingredients and then stored in bags in the freezer until needed. No cooking required! (At least until the day you want to serve them.)
The benefit of these meals is that they take very little time to prepare and freeze. Preparing the food in this way also means that when you take the bag out of the freezer, the food is being cooked for the first time – great for things like fish and chicken that can dry out when reheated.
I often pair a no-cook meal with a cooked meal, as you can easily prepare your no-cook meal while your other recipe is bubbling away on the stove or baking in the oven. For example, while your Luxury Seafood Chowder is simmering away, you can spend 10 minutes assembling a no-cook Easy-but-Luxury Fish Pie to pop straight in the freezer. The two dishes use similar ingredients, so the extra prep is minimal, and you have created two full meals in the same time it would have taken to make just the chowder alone.
THREE WAYS WITH …
Within the recipe chapters you’ll see features titled ‘Three Ways With …’ – these pages show you how, with a little bit of additional prep, one meal can be served in three different ways. There are some recipes that lend themselves particularly well to this treatment, and in each chapter throughout the book you’ll find a few. A great example of this is my recipe for Pulled Pork here. Cooking one large shoulder of pork will yield enough meat for several meals, so it’s nice to have different options for how to serve it. Here you’ll see that one delicious batch of Pulled Pork can be mixed with sweetcorn, spring onions and cheese and used as a delicious topping for baked sweet potatoes, spooned into fluffy brioche buns and served with a topping of apple sauce and crunchy fresh apple or spiced up with jalapenos and used as a delicious filling for quesadillas.
The recipes for sauces in the Sides & Sauces chapter are another example of where this feature is used, as once you’ve made your Basic Tomato Sauce, Pesto or Enchilada Pasta Sauce, it’s useful to have a variety of options on how to use them. In this way you’ll be able to use the recipes in this book time and again and they’ll feel fresh and different every time.
Are you ready to move to ultimate batcher status? Once you are used to using the paired-up recipes and doubling up on ingredients, the next stage is to move on to making even more meals with similar ingredients all at the same time.
At the end of every recipe chapter you will find a special section on how to cook 10 meals in 1 hour. The only exceptions to this are the Sides & Sauces and Desserts chapters – mainly because I couldn’t be trusted to have 10 desserts at once!
Though it sounds like an impossible task, once you’ve got the hang of cooking this way, you’ll never go back. And I’ll tell you a secret, it’s actually pretty simple! With a little organization, you will be amazed how many family meals you can make in such a short space of time.
The meals in these sections are all made using similar base ingredients, so you probably won’t want to eat them every night in succession, but if you put two in the fridge for the week ahead and the rest in the freezer, you’ll be well stocked with tasty meals that are a ready to go at a moment’s notice – and all with just 1 hour’s investment of your time!
Here’s how it works: In each of the four sections (Poultry, Meat, Fish and Veg), I give you a list of ingredients for each recipe, a full shopping list for the entire batch and one long method to make the five meals, each one scaled up to serve eight people.
This means that at the end of the hour you will have a double portion of each of the five meals ready to be portioned up and frozen for later. That’s a total of 40 individual servings made in 1 hour! Below are some tips to get you started …
SHOPPING FOR INGREDIENTS
Once you have decided which of the 10-meals sections you want to cook from, simply check the shopping list for the entire batch against what you already have in your cupboards.
If I’m planning to cook one of these menus, I will often do an online shop and have it delivered just before I want to start cooking. That way, I can simply arrange everything on my sides ready to go without having to put it all away first then having to dig through my kitchen to extract it all again later.
PREPPING YOUR KITCHEN
Before you embark on one of these mammoth cook-offs, you will want to make sure that your kitchen is clean and that your countertops are clear to arrange your ingredients on. It’s a good idea to make sure your food-waste and recycling bins are empty as well as your dishwasher, if you have one – that way you can tidy as you go. I also fill my sink with hot, soapy water so I can quickly wash my utensils as I use them, ready for reusing. I find it helps to have kitchen cleaner and fresh tea towels on hand so that I can quickly wash down the sides as I hop between prepping meals. This also avoids having a huge mound of washing up to tackle at the end!
Once your kitchen is ready to go, it’s a good idea to lay out all of the equipment that you will need – that way you won’t be scrabbling through the cupboards trying to find a pan or utensil halfway through a recipe. Don’t forget to have a supply of freezer bags and a pen for labelling to hand, too, so that you can bag up your wares ready for freezing at the end of each recipe.
SETTING OUT YOUR INGREDIENTS
In each 10-meals section, you will find an individual list of ingredients for each of the recipes you will be making, in the order that you will be making them. Make clearly-defined piles of ingredients according to each of these lists, that way you can easily jump back and forth between each recipe without wondering which pile of onions is for which recipe! If you have the space, leave the work surface directly around your stovetop clear to use during the actual cooking, then set the piles of ingredients out so that the pile closest to you is for the first recipe that you will be making, and so on.
BE REALISTIC WITH YOUR TIME
Don’t be disheartened if it takes more than an hour the first time you attempt to make one of these menus. Like anything new, it can take a little practice to get the hang of but, believe me, once you’re in the swing of it, each time will be quicker. Because I have made them so many times, I can now cook some of the menus in just 30 minutes!
A top tip for cooking these menus is to choose a time when the house is quiet and you won’t get distracted. When my kids were small, I would batch when they were at nursery, now they are teenagers and sleep late on Sunday mornings, I now batch for the week ahead then.
FILLING YOUR FREEZER
If you want a variety of dishes in your freezer and prefer not to cook from scratch at all mid week, then I suggest cooking one of these 10-meals sections every few weeks. I make a 10-meal batch every second Sunday, and if I cooked the fish batch last time, then I will do the chicken batch next. That way, I always have variety of different foods in my freezer.