Can you REALLY cook for the whole week in 2 hours?
A savvy new book says you can – using only these ingredients. But did it feed our hungry family of four...
TAKe one school run, add a meeting with your boss and stir in household chores. sprinkle in the stress of impending bath and bedtimes and — voila — a recipe for chaos that culminates in you plonking a lacklustre ready-meal in front of your famished brood at 7pm.
With family life so hectic, it’s little wonder we forgo fresh food for frozen convenience meals to see us through the week. But the resultant dinners are often as unsatisfying as they are nutritionally unbalanced — and can be costly, too.
Now, however, a new book promises to banish the madness of midweek mealtimes and overturn the assumption that busy families can’t eat well from Monday to friday.
In cook The Week In Two hours, busy working mother caroline Pessin makes a bold claim: you can ‘ batch- cook’ a week’s worth of meals in just two hours at the weekend, with less than 15 minutes’ preparation required to get food on the table each weekday evening. some of Pessin’s meal plans even include starters.
The book taps into the growing obsession with meal prepping, which sees some devotees assembling every morsel they’ll eat all week on a sunday afternoon. fans post photos on social media of all the week’s meals lined up in the fridge.
Not only can meal prepping ease the daily workload and free up time to spend with loved ones, Pessin says, it can also prevent food wastage and panicked splurges on expensive takeaways when there’s nothing in the fridge.
And, she insists, ‘by adopting a different approach to organising your meals and cooking, it is possible to alleviate the stress of making dinner each night for your family.’
As a working mother who’s alltoo-familiar with the frenzied 6pm freezer rifle for emergency fish fingers and chips to feed my husband, chris, and children, rosie, eight, and felix, six, this sounds like a genius idea.
But is it too good to be true? I recruited my family to help me find out . . .
THE PREMISE
cooK The Week In Two hours comprises 16 carefully planned weekly menus. each has seven dinner recipes — five main courses plus two starters for evenings when the main courses are lighter.
every recipe is designed to feed a family of four and Pessin assures us the ingredients required are easily found in supermarkets, which saves time spent shopping.
To streamline the preparation process, she recommends stocking up on basic foods that crop up repeatedly in recipes — for example, rice, pasta, flour and olive oil.
It’s also important you have the right equipment: a stock pot, frying pan and three saucepans, along with other basic tools such as baking trays and mixing bowls.
equally essential are storage containers, in which to keep batchcooked food fresh (usually in the fridge, although some recipes intended for nearer the end of the week will need to be stored in the freezer.)
Pessin recommends a maximum of 15 glass containers with airtight lids. Ikea and Amazon sell sets of these for less than £20 — although, as I didn’t have any beforehand, I ended up spending £93.97 on mine, which felt like rather a large investment.
The author also suggests having a fridge clear- out and some ‘empty-the-freezer’ meals before you start, to free up space.
THE WEEKLY SHOP
I chose my menu largely because it didn’t contain fish, which my children aren’t keen on (unless it’s of the finger variety).
We’re trying to reduce our meat consumption, too, so I was pleasantly surprised that the only meat required for all seven recipes was four chicken legs, 400g of beef and eight slices of Parma ham.
carbohydrates for the week come in the form of rice, quinoa and pasta, and the shopping list includes an impressive nine types of vegetables and fruit.
There’s also feta, mozzarella and goats’ cheese on the list and a sheet of ready-rolled puff pastry.
It took me around 40 minutes to fill my trolley, and the only item I couldn’t find in my local supermarket was uncooked pizza dough, which I bought online.
The total bill for the five dinners came to £58.26 — around twothirds of what I would normally spend on equivalent meals.
THE COUNTDOWN
Before you start, Pessin suggests setting out all your ingredients and equipment to save time.
This takes me about 20 minutes, and with ten glass containers, six courgettes and a huge stock pot jostling for space on my work surface, I start to feel a bit daunted, especially as Pessin says that, now everything is laid out, I should be able to cook it all in just 90 minutes.
I rarely make one meal from scratch, let alone five together.
however, the menu — split into 20 steps — proves surprisingly easy to follow.
I start by cooking chicken legs, then prepare ratatouille, move on to stuffing tomatoes and preparing salads and finish by making puff pastry turnovers.
There is a lot of dicing involved — onions, potatoes, aubergine, cucumber, courgettes, peppers, garlic and tomatoes all have to be chopped up, and they leave my kitchen looking like a culinary crime scene. Undoubtedly the
hardest part is peeling four onions, which — because I keep having to stop to wipe away painful tears — leaves me ten minutes behind schedule.
But overall the process is cleverly designed to allow you to cook several meals simultaneously and avoid wasting time or food.
After scooping out tomatoes to stuff, for example, I put the leftover flesh into my bubbling stockpot of ratatouille, some of which I later combine with goats’ cheese to make pastry turnovers.
And the same seasoning — Herbes de Provence (a mixture of rosemary, thyme and oregano) is used throughout.
I am concentrating so hard that, by the time I’ve finished my final step — shredding two chicken legs for storage — I am completely exhausted.
The cooking itself has taken me one hour and 56 minutes, after which I refrigerate most of my containers of prepared ingredients, freezing only the shredded chicken, turnovers and chopped tomatoes.
Taking into account the preparation beforehand, my overall efforts take two hours and 15 minutes. But I have yet to tackle the enormous pile of washing up, which adds another 15 minutes.
THE MEALS MONDAY
I AssemBle the starter by mixing my pre- cooked, cold quinoa with diced tomatoes, cucumber and peppers and a drizzling of lemon sauce, all from the fridge. I reheat the chicken legs in the oven and the ratatouille — which had been stored in the stock pot in the fridge — on the hob.
Reheating takes 15 minutes and, having never before served my family a starter on a monday night, let alone presented them with quinoa or tabbouleh, I feel smug as I dish it out.
The quinoa is met with a mixed reaction — ‘it tastes like squishy grains of sand’ is Felix’s verdict, while Rosie says she ‘wouldn’t necessarily choose it’ — but the chicken legs, sprinkled with Herbes de Provence, are eagerly devoured and the ratatouille is at least bravely attempted by my vegetable-averse children.
With only two legs between all of us, however, Chris complains there’s not enough meat.
TUESDAY
AFTeR rolling out two 400g balls of pizza dough and covering them with passata, I sprinkle over some of my prechopped courgettes and peppers, a few black olives and some pre-grated mozzarella.
The process takes six minutes, as Pessin predicts, although the kitchen does end up looking like a building site.
After the pizzas have been in the oven for ten minutes, I add four slices of Parma ham and a few basil leaves ( already washed and stored) to each.
The children are suspicious at first — ‘ Courgettes on pizza? Really, mummy?’ asks a horrified Felix — but end up scoffing the lot.
WEDNESDAY
WHIle the pasta is cooking, I fry garlic with chopped courgettes for ten minutes. When the pasta is cooked, I add it to the pan with the shredded chicken (removed from the freezer the night before), olives and creme fraiche.
Unfortunately, the creme fraiche congeals unappetisingly, but what Felix really objects to is being presented with courgettes for a third evening running. Normally a pasta fanatic, he refuses to eat a single mouthful and I end up warding off his hunger pangs with a portion of plain penne.
Rosie, who declares courgettes ‘iffy’, is slightly more diplomatic, asking: ‘ Is this cookbook called the Courgette Daily, mummy?’ Disappointing.
THURSDAY
HAvINg removed the turnovers and tomatoes from the freezer the night before, I reheat both in the oven for 15 minutes while cooking the white rice.
This evening, I’m pleasantly surprised as the children — who won’t normally eat any cheese but cheddar — enjoy two of the nine turnovers.
made by putting a spoonful of goats’ cheese and strained ratatouille into a circle of puff pastry, they are both simple and pleasingly sophisticated.
All of us love the tomatoes stuffed with mince and onion, but with only 100g of beef in each one, there isn’t anywhere near enough meat for Chris, who feels short-changed.
FRIDAY
I mIx my cold pasta — precooked and stored in the fridge — with 170g chopped feta and a pre-chopped cucumber and red pepper, stir in the last black olives from my jar, plus some basil and coriander, then drizzle with olive oil and white wine vinegar. It takes five minutes and, after I convince the kids that what they think is courgette really is cucumber, they tuck in — albeit picking out the ‘tangy’ feta as they go.
Chris, who would have preferred a takeaway to end the week, at least agreed this option was infinitely better for our waistlines and our wallets. THE VERDICT gRANTeD, my batch-cooking took nearer two hours and 30 minutes, including prep and washing up, but I’m confident I could whittle that down.
Of course, this strategy doesn’t do away with weekday cooking entirely, but the few minutes required each day feel effortless compared with starting from scratch.
I eat leftovers for lunch and love that I haven’t had to give weekday dinners a thought for five days. I’m impressed, and I’ll definitely use the book again — though I’ll steer clear of the courgettes next time.
n Cook The Week In Two Hours by Caroline Pessin is published by Hamlyn, £20.