Making cooking easier when you are stretched for time/working from home.
Whether you have been cooking for a while or are just a beginner, I promise you, it is not that hard to batch cook, make life simpler and plan ahead.
Speed Things Up
Step one ,lots of recipes give instructions for dicing, chopping ,minced, slicing, julienne, a food processor can be used for a lot of these tasks, if you do not have a food processer it is a great investment and speeds up prep time. If you are cutting veg with a knife, main trick is to keep all the veg roughly the same size ,this speeds up the cooking process.
1. Turn Dinner Into Lunch
Make a gluten free veg, meat or poultry curry ,make extra and for lunch the next day, heat it in the microwave and wrap it in a gluten free wrap.
- 2 cloves garlic, peeled
- 1 tin of chopped tomatoes
- ½ cayenne pepper
- 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 1 large onion, chopped
- 1 small yellow pepper, diced
- 2 washed Maris piper potatoes, diced
- 1 large carrot, diced
- 1 small, sweet potato, peeled and diced
- 1 1/2 Garam Masala
- 1 red chilli
- ½ tsp of turmeric powder
- 10 cauliflower florets
- 1/2 tin light coconut milk
- Half tin of drained chickpeas
- Handful of fresh coriander chopped
2. Method For Vegetable Curry
- Pulse ginger and garlic in food processor until finely chopped. Add tomatoes with juice and cayenne pepper, and pulse until Keep this for later in the recipe
- Heat oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add diced onion and pepper, cook, until softened(7 mins).
- Stir in potatoes, carrots, garam masala, and chilli powder. Cover reduce heat low, and cook for 10 minutes, stir
- Add cauliflower, tomato mix from step 1 and 1 cup of Simmer for 20 minutes. Take off the heat stir in coconut milk. Add black pepper. Sprinkle in chopped coriander.
3. Soup To Sauce
Make gluten free mushroom soup,(recipe on Minding me Gluten free course) make double the recipe, this can be converted into a pasta sauce with the addition of cream or low-fat Greek yoghurt.
If you like fish, bake or grill a piece of fresh skinless hake or cod and use the same sauce.
The sauce can be used with the addition of some chopped cooked bacon to serve with cooked chicken fillets.
4. Doubling Up
Do two dinners on one evening, plan a roast for one evening, while it is cooking make chilli con carne.
To reduce meat consumption, substitute half of the meat with tinned cooked flageolet beans or cannellini beans. Alternatively try our recipe for chicken and white bean chilli (Minding me gluten free course )
5. Tray Away
When the oven is on at weekend for the Sunday roast, throw in an extra tray of chopped root vegetables and baby potatoes, tossed in olive oil and Cajun seasoning.
When the vegetables are cold pop these into portion sizes in freezer bags. They can keep in the fridge for 3 days or you can freeze them. These portions can simply be used with a portion of meat, fish, or poultry during the week.
A portion can be used to make a delicious omelette.
For dinner, a portion can be added to cooked tinned lentils with diced gluten free chorizo.
