The Batch Lady. Suzanne Mulholland
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time snuggling up with a glass of wine and a good book, more time spent with friends and family. It’s about giving yourself time to exhale and process, and in today’s relentlessly busy world, that can only be a good thing. In practice, time management is simply looking at the many tasks that take up your time and working out how they can be streamlined to free you up for other stuff. The stuff that matters.
This method can be applied to everything from the way you get dressed in the morning, how you organize your laundry or do the housework to what you are making for dinner in the evening. Streamlining my life like this has saved my sanity and allowed me time to feel like me again – rather than some kind of cooking and cleaning automaton!
I apply this approach to every aspect of my life but the thing that has made the biggest difference, by far, is time managing the food that I cook for my family on a daily basis. Something that used to dominate every evening can now be accomplished in just an hour a week. Cooking in this way has allowed me to reclaim my evenings and my enjoyment of cooking – and it can do the same for you!
HEADSPACE NOT PERFECTIONISM
Batching is not about perfectionism. It’s about headspace.
I get asked by people all the time if I’m a perfectionist, to which I usually respond with a burst of laughter, because I am far from this. Being organized and managing my time is not about everything being perfect, it’s about giving myself a break from constantly thinking about those chores that have to be done day after day. Instead, my week is planned and I feel freer to enjoy the fun things, like spending time with my family and friends.
Batch cooking isn’t just about saving time in the kitchen – it also saves time on all the related chores like planning, shopping and washing up, too.
How many of us get to three in the afternoon and start to panic about what we’re going to have for dinner that evening? We swing by the supermarket on the way home and browse the shelves for inspiration, torn between the convenience of a pizza or ready meal and the pressure we feel to put something homemade and nutritious on the table.
My way of cooking does away with this stress. With a little planning, you can streamline your shopping so that you can buy all the food for the week in one go. All of the planning is done in advance, so your daily mental load is lightened and you are only buying the food that you really need, meaning that there is no waste, all of which is far better for you, your wallet and the environment!
When it comes to cooking, you can pretty much batch anything – if I’m going to be making a mess in the kitchen, I’d rather make five meals at once and have one big mess to tidy up as opposed to having to clean down the kitchen every night of the week. If the recipes are made using a lot of the same ingredients and techniques, all the better.
The old-fashioned image of batch cooking is often centered around creating a huge vat of one meal, say a large pot of soup or a huge curry that you will be eating for weeks, but, for me, batch cooking is about cooking food that uses similar ingredients to create very different meals. For example, in one batch you can create a Moussaka and some Lamb & Feta Burgers, or even a Potato Dauphinoise and a Spanish Omelette – recipes that use many of the same ingredients, but offer great variety in your weekly meal plan.
The recipes in this book are all for fuss-free midweek meals. Nothing fancy or unachievable, just real food for the way real people cook, every day.
When planning the food for this book, I put a post on my social media channels asking for my followers to share their weekly meal planners with me. What quickly became very clear was that people were looking for simple food that tasted great and could be prepared with minimum fuss. With that in mind, I planned the recipes in this book around family favourites that, with a little batching magic, can be on the table in a jiffy.
Each recipe is pared back to its basics – this will save you time and, I promise, I have only cut corners where it doesn’t impact on the final result.
If you are cooking for a special occasion or just want to dress up your dinner a bit, I’ve suggested some ways you can zhuzh (my favourite word!) up some of the recipes, and you’ll see these marked on the pages as you work your way through.
If a meal contains spices, I have erred on the side of caution and opted for delicate rather than ‘blow-your-head-off’ hot, as my meals are designed to be family friendly. If you like more spice, simply adjust the levels to your tastes. As a general rule, it’s good to remember that spice can always be added, but never removed!
WORKING IN PAIRS
All of the recipes in this book are paired-up with another. These are dishes that lend themselves to being prepared together, and throughout the recipe methods you will find tips on how to save time by jumping between the two. Sound complicated? I promise you it’s not! Each of the meals can also be made as a standalone dish, serving 4–6 people, so it’s up to you if you want to batch it with the other meal.
Once you’ve got the hang of batching two recipes together, you can start doubling up and making four full meals at once!
ODD ONES OUT
When pairing recipes, it sometimes makes sense to match a savoury dish with a sweet, or a meat dish with a veggie. If you take my Plait recipes as an example, you’ll see that both recipes use the same technique, which is why they are paired together, but this does mean that you’ll find a sweet recipe in the middle of the meat chapter! To help you identify this, all of the recipes are colour-coded and marked with a symbol in the top corner so that you know exactly what kind of recipe you are looking at. The symbols are:
TO COOK. TO FREEZE. TO COOK FROM FROZEN
Every dish in this book can be cooked fresh, or made in advance and stored in the freezer until needed. At the bottom of each recipe you will see the headings ‘To Cook’,