Planning a Week.
Seven dinners cooked from scratch take about five hours of hands-on time. With one Sunday batch session, the same week takes three.
A weekly plan answers three questions before the week starts: what will we eat each night, what must be bought, and when will each thing be cooked. Writing the meals down first makes the shopping list follow from them, so one shop covers the week, nothing is bought twice, and perishables are bought for the nights they will be used. Planning by ingredient helps too: a whole chicken roasted on Sunday is dinner, then sandwiches, then stock (XXII.1) for Wednesday's soup; a pot of rice cooked once becomes Thursday's fried rice (XXI.4).
Batch cooking — "cook once, eat twice" — does the slow work in one session: a stew, a braise, a pot of beans, a tray of roast vegetables, each covering two or three meals. The time saved is hands-on time: chopping, browning and washing up happen once, and the reheating nights take ten minutes. The rule that limits it is safety: cooked food keeps three to four days in the fridge (XII.11), so batches for later in the week go into the freezer and come out to thaw the night before. The workshop plans a week.
Below: the hands-on cooking minutes in a week from the nights you cook from scratch and the batch dishes you make on Sunday (each covering two dinners), against cooking every night from scratch (teaching times: 40 minutes a fresh dinner, a 30-minute batch session plus 40 minutes a dish, 10 minutes to reheat, 15 for a quick meal).
- Plan meals before shopping.
- Write a shopping list from the plan.
- Batch-cook safely for later in the week.
- Use one ingredient across several meals.
Write it down, shop once, cook once for twice
With these teaching times, seven dinners from scratch take about 280 minutes of hands-on work a week; three fresh nights and two batch dishes cooked on Sunday take about 270. The batch dishes cover four nights, so the last of them should be frozen on Sunday and thawed in the fridge the night before (XIII.3) — the fridge limit of three to four days is the constraint every plan works within.
A working template: on the weekend, write the week's dinners on a list, check the fridge and pantry first (XXIII.2), and write the shopping list from the gap; cook one or two batch dishes and a pot of grains or beans; on weeknights, cook quick fresh dishes — a stir-fry, an omelette, pasta, fish — early in the week while produce is fresh, and the batch dishes later. Label containers with the date. Cook the same plan two weeks running and change one dish at a time; a plan that works is one you stop thinking about.
Plan next week's dinners on paper, write the shopping list from the plan, and note how much you would have bought without it.
Terms
- Meal plan
- The week's meals decided before shopping.
- Batch cooking
- Cooking several meals' worth at once.
- Cook once, eat twice
- Planning one cooked dish to feed two or more meals.
- First in, first out
- Using older stock before newer (XXIII.2).
Sources
- USDA FSIS, "Leftovers and Food Safety": refrigerate within two hours, eat within 3–4 days or freeze; reheat to 74 °C (165 °F). FDA Food Code 2022, 3-403.11: food reheated for hot holding reaches 74 °C within two hours.
- A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.