Batch Cooking: The Solution For Planning Your Meals!

Lack of time, fatigue, lack of inspiration, tired of cooking every night… How about making your life easier by planning your meals with batch-cooking recipes? Behind this intriguing expression hides a simple and practical method of planning your meals: cooking in one go and in quantity. All you have to do the following week is combine your different ingredients. With batch cooking, you cook and eat healthy!

Batch Cooking: The Definition

Batch cooking is a technique that consists of preparing your dishes for the week beforehand to relieve you of this task and free up your time during the week. Concretely, it is a question of cooking several dishes simultaneously to reheat them or preparing each food separately to assemble them when the time comes.

How To Do Batch Cooking? 

Do you want to start batch cooking? For this, it is essential to take into account several aspects:

1. The choice of your dishes: before starting, inventory your cupboards, freezer, and refrigerator. You can use what you already have in your batch-cooking recipes.
2. Look at the vegetables and fruits of the moment and choose one or two that will be the star ingredients of your menu. Indeed, one of the principles of batch cooking is to use the same ingredient several times to prepare different dishes to make the job as easy as possible.
3. Optimize your cooking points: do not choose three recipes that can be cooked in the oven, but try to vary them. This will allow several dishes to be cooked simultaneously.
4. Preserve your food well: preservation is one of the secrets of batch cooking! To prevent your dishes from losing their flavor, it is advisable to keep them in airtight containers. Otherwise, you can turn to freezing or vacuum packing.

Batch Cooking: Our Organizational Advice 

With batch cooking, you have to plan your menus for the week. For this, you can use an agenda or a planner. You will be able to register your dishes, the composition of your recipes, and the organization of your meals. On weekends, free yourself for a few hours to cook all the week’s meals (alone or with family).

What Is The Best Batch Cooking Book? 

Several books are now available to guide you in setting up batch cooking. Among them, you can find:

1. In 2 Hours, I Cook for the whole week by Caroline Pessin: this book will help you find recipe ideas to cook for the whole week.
2. The dishes offered are varied and favor fresh and seasonal products. In addition to guiding you through the preparation steps, the author gives you the shopping list and advises you on last-minute cooking.
3. It’s Decided I batch cook by Sandra Thomann: this book presents a variety of menus as well as some tips for getting organized.
4. Thanks to this book, you can choose menus and prepare them in 2-3 hours per week. To reheat them, it takes about ten minutes.

Vegetarian Batch Cooking Recipes

If you want to adopt batch cooking, here are three recipe ideas you can prepare.

Coral Lentil Pancakes

For this dish, you need the following:

1. 220 coral red lentils
2. Three potatoes
3. An egg
4. Two shallots
5. A clove of garlic
6. A teaspoon of curry powder
7. A teaspoon of paprika powder
8. A teaspoon of cayenne pepper
9. Two tablespoons of cornstarch
10. Olive oil
11. Salt and pepper

Preparation

To begin with, strip and cut the potatoes into little blocks. Cook them with the lentils in salted water for 10 minutes. Drain them and mix them coarsely. Peel and chop the garlic and shallot. Add them to your robot and remix them. Beat the egg with the spices, add the cornstarch and the vegetable puree, and mix. Add salt and pepper. Heat a little olive oil in a frying pan and place a few heaps of lentil preparations. Cook for 3 to 4 minutes on each side (the patties should be golden brown). Serve hot.

Quiche With Broccoli And Cheese

This recipe is straightforward to make:

1. Preheat your oven to 180°C
2. Spread your puff pastry in your pie pan
3. Spread over  400 g of broccoli florets, steamed and well drained
4. Beat two eggs with 100 g of cream cheese, three tablespoons of liquid cream, dried chives, salt and pepper.
5. Pour over your broccoli
6. Put in the oven for 30 minutes
7. Serve warm

Ratatouille Pizza

The ingredients of this recipe are:

1. A pizza dough
2. 400g leftover ratatouille
3. 20 cl of tomato puree
4. 100g grated cheese
5. A drizzle of olive oil
6. Salt and pepper

Preparation

After preheating your oven to 210°C, spread your pizza dough on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper. Pour and spread the tomato purée, distribute the ratatouille, sprinkle with grated cheese, olive oil, salt, and pepper, and bake for 35 minutes.

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