12 Strategies for a Successful Cooking Day
One common strategy for saving money on food, found in many lean books and many lean websites, is the idea of a “cook day,” sometimes simply called “cook Sunday,” because people often use for this Sunday. …
This post was originally published on The Simple Dollar .
The idea is that on this day, you will do all the work of preparing several dishes at the same time, bringing them to the point that all you have to do is reheat them to eat.
So, for example, you can cook a full lasagna on the day you cook a meal by slicing all the vegetables, cooking the noodles, cooking the various layers, and placing all the ingredients in a 9 by 13-inch pan so you’re ready to stick right into the oven … but right into the oven. you will not stick it in. Instead, you cover the pan and put it in the freezer.
Then, a day or two before you really want to eat this lasagna for dinner, you take it out of the freezer and put it in the refrigerator to thaw. When you get home from work in the evening, just preheat the oven, put the lasagna in there for 45 minutes or so, and get to work. Homemade food will be on the table very soon.
You can follow much the same principle for almost anything you multicooker, oven bake, or even grill. We used it for grilling food (so we just took them out of the freezer and then right on the grill), made soups and stews for the multicooker (we just pour the container into the multicooker in the morning, turn it on low and leave it for the day ), making casseroles of all kinds, and even making the basic ingredients of other dishes, such as making and seasoning meat and / or other taco protein.
There are several advantages to using a “cooking day”.
First of all, the whole purpose of a “cooking day” is to encourage you to eat at home. Eating at home is almost always much cheaper than eating out because you don’t pay for all of the labor, maintenance, and construction costs, and the extra profit margin that goes into dining out at a restaurant. Since you cook a lot of food at home, you will save a lot of money.
Secondly, “cooking day” allows you to buy ingredients in bulk. If you’re making multiple copies of the same dish, or preparing multiple dishes with overlapping ingredients, you can buy those common ingredients in bulk and save a lot of extra money.
Third, by cooking multiple copies of the same food, you are using your time more efficiently. Instead of boiling the lasagna pasta four times, you only do it once and cook the noodles four times at a time. Instead of taking out a chopping board and chopping one onion for one meal and then peeling the chopping board and knife, you take it out, chop enough onion for multiple meals, then peel the board and knife, saving you several rounds of washing. Simply put, it is much more efficient to cook several dishes at once than to cook them all separately.
Finally, having a bunch of ready-to-eat meals on hand can save you labor on busy weekday evenings. Many families, especially those in which all adults are busy with work and careers, try their best to feed the table in the evening, and as a result of this process, they often either give up some other important occupation or end up with expensive food in a restaurant. Storing homemade food in the fridge or freezer is a third option, allowing people to balance evening activities and free time with the desire to eat inexpensive homemade food.
Here are twelve strategies to make your cooking day a great success.
Strategy # 1 – Plan Your Meals and Shopping in Advance
When you start your “cooking day,” you should have all the ingredients in your cupboard, pantry, or refrigerator, and each recipe should be laid out right in front of you. If you don’t, then you are not ready for your cooking day.
The first step on a day of food preparation should happen a few days before, when you select several recipes and decide how many of each you are going to cook. Are you going to cook six batches of beef stew? Where is the recipe? What ingredients do you need?
From there, you need to compile a giant grocery list that includes everything you need from all of these recipes, and do it a day or two before your big cooking day. This will likely be expensive, but remember that you are preparing a ton of meals in one go.
For example, the last time I cooked a meal, I spent $ 325 on ingredients. However, I prepared four to five servings of seven different dishes, each with enough food to feed my family of five and provide leftover lunch for Sarah and me for at least a couple of days. Let’s say I had an average of 4.5 batches of seven different dishes, and each batch covered the individual meals of eight people. That’s 252 meals, which means the average cost of a meal was $ 1.29 per person. Yes, I dropped $ 325, but my family was provided with 252 meals.
Strategy # 2 – Synergize Cooking Ingredients
One effective strategy is to make sure that at least some of the recipes are the same in terms of ingredients, so you can cook many of the same ingredient in one batch.
I like to use a bow as an example here. We often eat with onions, so I like to choose a few recipes with diced onions. Let’s say a lasagna recipe calls for one small caramelized yellow onion chopped, and a soup recipe calls for that as well. I do five batches of each, so that makes ten small yellow onions chopped.
I weigh them in the store and realize that ten small onions weigh about the same as six large onions, so I buy six large onions in a bundled bag and save some money. Then, when I start cooking my food, I chop all of the onions at once and then caramelize all of those onions at once in the pan.
Boom – all the onion preparation for ten different dishes is done at the same time, which saves me a lot of time and a little money.
Strategy # 3 – Do these little prep activities a day or two early if you can.
In the onion example above, I did it on a Thursday night and not a regular Saturday for cooking. On Thursday night I had about an hour and a half of free time, so I just chopped all the onions and sautéed them, then put all those sautéed onions in a large container and put them in the refrigerator.
Yes, I could easily do this on my normal cooking day, but since I had a block of time free, I could actually take care of this particular little task at the start of the week. After all, the fried onions keep just fine in the fridge for a couple of days, and then I can just pull them out and use them right away in recipes on the day I cook.
That’s why it’s a good idea to make a list of tasks you will need to complete on the day you prepare your food. Once you’ve figured out the recipes and identified some synergies between the recipes, identify some common tasks between recipes, such as slicing onions or celery, or dicing potatoes, or slicing stews. Then, if you have some free time in the evening, do this task early and store the results in the refrigerator. This will save you time on your own cooking day and can really save you feeling overwhelmed on that day.
Strategy # 4 – Give yourself plenty of time
Whatever you do, don’t waste time preparing food. Do not. Make. This.
If you have a day off when you have an appointment in the afternoon or something like that, don’t use that day as a day for cooking.
The reason is simple: something might go wrong and it will take you longer than you expect. This happens almost every time. If you have a very busy schedule, you suddenly find that things are not going well. If you start to rush, something else will go wrong, and something else, and something else.
Don’t start preparing large amounts of food on such a tight schedule. Little things will go wrong and then they will lead to bigger problems if you run out of time.
Instead, pick a day when you have nothing going on all day, and then start early enough so that, if everything goes perfectly, you have significant free time at the end of the day. So if things take longer than you expect — and they probably will — that’s by no means a problem.
Strategy # 5 – Make sure you have the necessary containers
Another thing to consider is whether you have suitable containers to hold all the food you cook. Do you have enough baking pans to hold all your planned casseroles? Do you have enough ready-to-freeze soup containers to hold your entire soup?
For the casseroles, we use the Glad OvenWare 9 “x 12” pans . They are inexpensive, reusable, and work great in the freezer. For soups and stews, we use these reusable soup containers . Again, very reusable and easy to freeze. For things like sandwiches, burritos and single meals, we use a mixture of Ziploc freezer bags and these custom food containers . Again, the freezer is convenient and reusable. Here is such a topic.
These container options alone should store almost anything you might want to prepare on the day you prepare your food.
Strategy # 6 – Make sure you have storage space too
You have food. You have containers. You have a plan. Make sure you have enough storage space for everything you do.
If you have a freezer, you should at least make sure there is enough space to store everything you do. We can store food in the freezer for at least a month, so it’s convenient.
If you don’t have a freezer, you’re going to use a smaller freezer on the top or bottom of your refrigerator for long-term storage. I wouldn’t cook for more than a week unless you are alone and prepare many small, personalized meals.
Remember, you can store ready meals in the refrigerator for a couple of days without freezing them. There is nothing wrong with preparing food on Saturday and, for example, leaving it in the fridge to finish cooking on Monday or Tuesday.
Strategy # 7 – Label Everything!
One of the most important elements of my cooking days is a Sharpie marker and a roll of masking tape. Nothing will end up in the freezer unmarked with these tools.
I simply tear off a piece of masking tape, attach it to the container, and write today’s date and food composition. I usually label things with a V for vegetarians and a V with a circle for vegan so I know what I can / should pull out in certain guest situations.
So, if I cooked a root vegetable stew, I would label it something like “1/24/2017 – Root Stew – V” with a V in a mug if the stew is actually vegan.
I also often place one or two more strips on the item and describe what needs to be done to complete the preparation. For example, in a skillet with lasagna, I could write something like “Bake 350 F for 50 minutes without a lid after thawing in the refrigerator for one day.” The goal is to minimize the amount of thought or work I need to do when I pull out this item to use it.
Strategy # 8 – Make soups thicker than usual
One thing I learned on cooking days is that pretty much everything ends up giving off moisture in the freezer. In the case of soup, the water simply escapes the vegetables and makes the soup thinner.
My philosophy with soups is to make them a little thicker than I would normally before freezing them. I use a little less liquid than usual, or add a little cornstarch to thicken the liquid.
This is because in the freezer, the vegetables in the soup will release some moisture, adding to the water in the liquid. This way, when you reheat it, there will be a little more moisture in the broth and it will appear more “normal”.
Remember, you can always add a little more liquid on reheating if you feel like it is necessary, but you cannot remove the liquid at this point without getting rid of the flavor.
Strategy # 9 – Make a Burrito with Rice or Potatoes
One of my favorite foods is breakfast burritos. I usually make scrambled eggs burritos with lots of vegetables and other foods cooked right in the eggs. (Personally, I prefer mushrooms, onions, green peppers, and some diced tomatoes.)
However, if I use this particular mixture, the burritos will be very watery when I cook them later. So my secret ingredient in breakfast burritos is to add some grated potatoes and / or rice to the mixture, mainly to absorb excess liquid. Another good strategy is to cook the ingredients for the burrito before you add the eggs, so cook the onions first until they are translucent or even caramelized and make sure the skillet is practically dry.
You want the burritos to feel dry when you put them in the freezer. If they appear wet at all, they will be wet afterwards. It’s the same with enchiladas and lasagna.
Speaking of wet lasagna …
Strategy # 10 – Make cooked pasta / noodles as dry as possible
If you cook any dish with pasta in it, you will find that the relative dryness of the pasta makes a huge difference in how wet the dish will be when you cook it again after being in the freezer.
If you take the noodles straight out of the boiling water and use them right away, everything will get wet. If you strain them, you will likely find more dampness in the casserole than you would like.
The solution is to dry the noodles before using them. You might even consider using oven-ready noodles in their dry form for things like lasagna; although I don’t like their texture, they will help make sure it’s not too damp in there.
My usual strategy for lasagna and other pasta dishes is to line the noodles on parchment paper after I cook them, and then dry them a little more with a paper towel before placing them in the casserole. I also prepare any liquids I use – if I use marinara sauce, I cook it in a saucepan before using it to get rid of some of the liquids, or I make my own, with a lot of tomatoes. insert. Sometimes I even use a little cornstarch to make it even thicker.
These steps will help prevent the lasagna from liquefying after a while in the freezer.
Strategy # 11 – Save One of Your Cooked Meals for Dinner in the Evening
Every time we choose a day to cook, we leave one meal completely unused and store it in the refrigerator; this is the food we eat for dinner that same night. We usually just pick the batch of food we like best in the cooking process.
This means that after everything is done and cleaned up, we do not need to prepare another meal for dinner. We just take one of our cooked meals from the fridge and toss it in the oven or pot and we’re done.
This is a good way to end a long day of cooking.
Strategy # 12 – Consider Doing It From a Social Point of View
One final tip: A big day of cooking is a great activity with a friend or two. Invite a friend for the day and cook everything together.
I highly recommend that one of you two plan out all the recipes and then split the shopping list between the two of you. Each of you buys ingredients from this list, then one friend comes along with the purchased ingredients and containers that they want to use in the laundry basket (for easy portability) along with any other necessary items or tools, such as an extra bowl or two.
Then just make huge batches of everything! Prepare ten servings of soup at once in a giant broth pan, then ladle it into ten different soup containers! Make eight casseroles of lasagna at once!
Not only will you have an extra set of hands for all of this, you will also have someone to hang out with and interact with throughout the entire process.
Final thoughts
A “cooking day” can save you a huge amount of money and time if you choose to set aside a day solely for pre-cooking. If you can, the savings from bulk purchases and frequent meals at home, as well as the time savings from synergies in cooking, will ultimately benefit your financial and personal life immensely.
Good luck!
12 Strategies for a Successful Prep Day | Simple dollar