BATCH COOKING
How a pot of black beans can solve dinner all week
Getting dinner on the table on a Wednesday afternoon will forever be a problem that needs be solved.
Where do you find the energy to start a meal after a full day of work? How do you find time for cooking when you have all of 1.75 hours between arriving home and needing to wrangle kids into bedtime routines or desperately needing to lie like broccoli?
I am a fervent advocate of meal planning and have spent the greater part of my last seven years tracking family meal plans on my blog. Meal plans give you a map for a week and help you take the guesswork out. Absolutely. They do.
That said, I totally acknowledge that it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what can actually get accomplished in that 1.75 hours that you have on Wednesday, and it is in that trial and error phase that most folks get frustrated and give up on meal planning.
So, I have a different proposition for you — a baby step of sorts. Instead of tackling a meticulous plan that will cover an entire week’s worth of meals, how about cooking up a large batch of a few simple ingredients to give your week a jump-start? Don’t worry, we’re not talking about cooking 21 casseroles in a weekend.
It’s something more along the lines of cooking a large portion of brown rice, cutting some veggies, maybe making a sauce, and using those ingredients to give you lots of readied options at 6 p.m. a few days later.
Much like planning based on a few seasonally available vegetables, planning a handful of meals around a few base ingredients limits options, but in the best possible way. It gives your meal plan a starting place and helps you learn how to best work with ingredients on hand along the way.
With practice you’ll be better equipped for last-minute dinners and your #kitchensinkdinners and #kitchensinksalads will be exponentially better.
Tips:
■ Make your first ingredient one that you actually love. This is not the time to teach yourself to tolerate the earthy taste of a lentil if you usually find yourself pushing them to the side of your plate.
Start with a single grain or legume in an amount that can be reasonably used within three to four days. I would suggest a single dry pound of a legume or 2 uncooked cups of a grain.
Season simply. Simple seasoning of salt and pepper for your large batch gives you flexibility to go from Mediterranean to Indian to Italian flavor profiles with that same batch.
The cookbook index is your friend when you are trying to narrow recipes down. Zone in on your batch ingredient in the index of a cookbook you’ve been wanting to use. From there, focus on recipes that have familiar ingredients or things that you already keep on hand in your pantry or fridge.
Try something different with the last bits. Trying out new flavor combinations or preparations is a lot easier to stomach if you are trying to use up 1/2 cup of this or 1/4 cup of that.
Use your freezer! Don’t feel bad if you get to the second meal and realize that there is no way that you can eat another chickpea. It happens. Use it as an opportunity to build up your homemade freezer stash for dinners in the following weeks, but act on that impulse that you’re not going to eat it. If you wait until the following Sunday, you can’t freeze it for later and you’ll have to waste the food.
Once you start finding ways to use up that large batch of a legume/grain, you might try making a sauce or a vinaigrette that you can use on salads and simply prepared vegetables during the week.