Saving Time with Batch Cooking

With two little children who are constantly at feet wanting snuggles at the end of the day the last thing I ever feel like doing is cooking a meal. However, we all need to eat and I like to make nutrition choices that will feed our minds and bodies as well as something that we will all hopefully enjoy.

With a picky three-year-old, an 18-month-old who would eat the kitchen sink, a husband who gets home right at 5 PM and myself usually just getting in from meetings or heading back out to teach, I need to have meals prepared before hand and ready to go. The principle of meal prep always sounds simple. I write out our meal plan, create a list of what we need at the grocery store and then cross my fingers that I will actually have time and patience to follow the plan.

Cue in my fabulous friends! A good friend was returning to the workforce after an extended maternity leave and I thought it would be a great idea to organize a cooking day. Four friends, endless knives, food processors, slow cookers, dishes and 8 hours later we emerged with 17 meals each to take home, ready for our freezers, with directions on how to cook and / or re-heat when needed.

So how did the day work?

Many emails flew around dedicated to deciding what we would cook. Taking into consideration the needs of 10 different children with varying likes and dislikes and ensuring these were meals that 8 adults would still want to eat and would enjoy as well was an adventure in its own right. Did I forget to mention that these recipes needed to be easy to cook and prep and we wanted to get a large quantity out of them?

We finally settled on the recipes below. I have made a few little notes of adjustments I would make the next time I batch cook each specific recipe.

1) Pesto chicken
**This is DELICIOUS!! I have already made more!!

2) Beef & barley stew
**my family really enjoyed this. Another family found it a little too “tomatoey”

3) Hearty Italian Sausage Stew
*this is a tad on the spicy side but was still enjoyed by everyone but the 3 year old at my house. Lovely husband did mention that he would prefer it over pasta or rice next time and I think I would agree.

4) Butternut Squash Mac & Cheese
*WOW! This is wonderful! I have already made it again and eased back on the pepper again for the kids’ sake and hubby and I added more when we spooned out our servings. The second time I made it I didn’t wait long enough for the cheese/butternut squash sauce to smooth out so our mac and cheese was a little “rougher” than it was the first time.

5) Classic Lasagna Rolls
*Umm…yeah….so about the lasagna rolls. After 7 hours of cooking we all agreed that it was a much better idea to just make lasagna instead of individually rolling boxes and boxes of cooked noodles.

6) Chili-maple glazed chicken
*This was good but I am not sure if I would make it a lot more. I cooked it with some rice pilaf. I think it would be really really good on a salad! Lettuce, veggies, chili-maple chicken and some salsa!

7) Pasta sauce (no recipe just a tomato sauce with lots and lots of blended veggies in it that can simmer all day while we work)
*We ended up making spaghetti sauce and chili that simmered all day. Mmmmm both were very good!

I went with another friend to do all the grocery shopping the day before. We knew it would be much easier to coordinate one or two people to do the shopping together; and splitting one bill eight ways is easier than everybody buying things and then trying to figure out who owed how much to whom. All together, doing the groceries took about 3 hours from the time we stepped into the first store until the time we had everything unloaded at another friend’s home. We visited three stores and scored the best deals in town. Kudos to my friend B who is the queen of grocery shopping! She knew where to buy our groceries, what sales were in fact good deals and what we needed to do our batch cooking. I would never have thought to purchase a large roast and cut it into cubes to use as stewing meat instead of purchasing it pre-cut and packaged. Huge cost savings! Left on my own to handle the shopping, I would have easily cost the group an extra $200 just in meat! Between the chicken breasts (who goes to the stores and buys over 75 chicken breasts? We do, ha!), the ground beef and the stewing meat, B saved us a lot of money!

Next time we will definitely make a more detailed our grocery list so we are not doing math on the fly. How many ounces are in a cup? If I need 2 tablespoons of something and we are multiplying the recipe by 8 and the item is sold by the milliliter, then how much do we really need?!

We also planned out ahead of time what kitchen equipment each of us would need to bring on the big day. Slow cookers, cheese graters, bowls (you can never have enough large mixing bowls!!), sharp knives, etc. Apparently what we weren’t fully prepared for was the amount of food we would actually be bringing home. We wound up making an unplanned trip to the store between recipes to pick up additional storage containers. By then we needed a chocolate run anyways!

Eight hours later, we had tons of food and were very happy with all that we had accomplished. We have already planned our next big cooking day and now we just need to pick out what we will make!