Our house is increasingly mad in the evenings.

We’re thinking of having meals we’ve already cooked ready to be reheated to maximise our time. We’d probably try to do two big meals on one night and have leftovers for a few meals after.

Does anyone else do this? Any things you’ve found work well or variations? eg, “lasagne night, meat and two veg night” etc.

Cheers!

Meat & 2 veg night is excellent but Mrs Wombat and I tend to wait until the children are asleep for this……

Yep. Try to plan at least 10 days in advance but don’t always manage. Makes a huge difference to shopping, cooking and thinking time.

Roast a chicken one night, leftovers into thai curry/stir fry quickly the next.

Bolognase becomes chilli the second night.

Curry’s always a keeper.

Making 4 or 5 portions of ragu for bolognese / chilli takes little more effort than making 1.

Bung your meat, onions, celery, carrots, garlic and tomatoes in a big pan and make it into a bog standard sauce.

Split it in two and turn one into bolognese and one into chilli. Put the extra portions into a carton and freeze. That way you have a home made ready meal that you can defrost whilst you’re cooking the pasta / rice. Everyone fed a decent meal with the minimum of fuss.

Leftover roast? Slice it into a takeaway carton cover it in gravy and freeze it. You can cook your veg whilst you defrost the meat. No leftovers? Cook a bigger bit of meat next time. Can’t afford a bigger bit? Buy a cheaper cut and learn how to cook it slowly, shin beef for example.

Also plan out your meals, it makes it easier and keeps your shopping bill down too. Depending how you are in the kitchen you’ll be able to turn the same set of ingredients into a number of dishes depending on time and taste so the meal plan needn’t be set in stone.

I’ll make someone a great wife one day!!!!

wombat – Member
Meat & 2 veg night is excellent but Mrs Wombat and I tend to wait until the children are asleep for this……

Is there much meat on a wombat?

Less so in Spring and Summer, but in Autumn and winter I batch cook upto 40 portions (3 or 4 dishes x10+) and freeze them. It means I dont have to cook from scratch three or four evenings of the week. Usually staples like beef stew, sausage casserole, chilli/bolognese, fish pie, chicken curry etc.

Im fortunate in that I have the time to cook each day between school pick up at 3:30 and 6pm when we eat. The kids do some homework or wind down from school day, we get time together, I dont have to rush too much, and once the boys are fed, from 6:15 onwards I can disappear on the bike and Mrs Stoner gets the kids to bed/reads with them.

domesticgoddesstrackworld

Worth remembering that good meals don’t have to take forever to cook, you can throw together a decent meal reasonably quickly.

Also plan out your meals, it makes it easier and keeps your shopping bill down too.

This is what I do.

Before I do the main weekly shop I work out what meals I need to do for the week, and then buy the main ingredients for them (ie meat, fish, veg). We may have them in a different order, and sometimes not at all and the meat/fish goes into the freezer.

If we make a dish that can be frozen afterwards, often we’ll make a double portion (curry, shepherds pie etc).

Also, don’t be a slave to the list 🙂

I do a combination of ‘proper cooking’ meals – roast meats, currys etc and ‘speed meals’ – pastas etc. As IA – leftovers can become the protein in a ‘speed meal’.

It’s more the kids clubs timings that drive all this.

We do a plan for a fortnight.
The farm shop we go to is too far to go every week so we do a fortnightly shop there (mainly meat) and get what we need according to the menu we’ve planned.
It means we only buy food that we know we’ll be eating and consequently virtually nothing gets wasted, which is great for my tight Yorkshire sensibilities

Is there much meat on a wombat?

There is on this one 8)

Friday when I order our shopping what meals we’re having for the next 7 days and buy everything I need so we minimise waste – I haven’t thrown out any food aside from the odd manky spud whatnot for months.

But the only time I ‘pre-make’ is Tuesday, it’s invariably Cottage Pie, I cook up a double batch of mince – half goes for Spag Bol, have for the pie which I freeze – so when I ride after work Thursday Mrs. Jay just has to stick it in the oven when she gets home from work.

I do all the cooking in my house, I actually enjoy it – Baby goes to bed at 7pm, I’m cooking and my Wife and Son are sat at the kitchen table doing his homework /chatting it’s pretty much the only time TV doesn’t take over.

I cook about 50% of the baby food too, not for any high and might earth mother reasons – packaged baby food is very good these days, but because I like the fact she likes my food – carrot, sweet potato and potato mash with fish is her fave at the moment – it’s pretty dam good if I do say so myself!

We always double up (at least) when cooking and then freeze for “mad” nights. Just remember to get them out in the morning! I must admit that rather than have a full meal ready to heat we tend to have pre-made stocks of things that we can readily assemble to make a “fresh” meal as desired (mainly because I’m fickle, indecisive and have a limited attention span).

We make a good generic red sauce in large quantities that works for pasta, lasagne, bread salad, etc. just by varying the trimmings.

Chilli works well (rice, wraps or on tortilla chips, throw in some fresh toms, avocado and coriander)

Risotto is good from the fridge (again a generic base risotto then add mushrooms, peas, leftover chicken/ham, etc as required during the reheat)

Curry always works and freezes well

Paella seems to get better in the fridge so a favourite with me. Can also form into burgery shaped things, coat with flour and fry for variety (also works for risotto)

Egg fried rice is a quick one to do if you have left over cold rice (say from curry or chilli night) some spring onions and some peas.

Fish cakes freeze well, it’s no more faff to make 20 than it is 4, and can be just thrown in the oven.

Being veggie (or prepared to eat veggie) also helps as you cut down on cooking time.

Can’t believe all this planning. Do people really plan 2 weeks worth of meals in advance? In our house we just make it up as we go along. I’m obviously lower down the OCD scale than I thought I was.

I’m obviously lower down the OCD scale than I thought I was.

Or maybe not as busy. It tends to get important when everything else is going mad

I’m obviously lower down the OCD scale than I thought I was.

I don’t think OCD means what you think it does.

From a tanget, my ‘tip’ would be to get a slow cooker, you can bung stuff in in the morning and have a great meal ready that evening. Also, they invariably cook in a decent batch size providing lovely leftovers.

We all have a say in the Menu plan and share the prep/cooking.
Shopping to the menu plan makes it a lot easier.
Double cook ..1 for table..1 for freezer.
Double cook ..1 for the table ,then 1 for taking to work to have before night/training ride .
Have batches of Chilli,Spag-bol type sauces in the freezer as back up.

Can’t believe all this planning. Do people really plan 2 weeks worth of meals in advance?

I plan 3 weeks in advance, and I have a spreadsheet 😳

We do batches sometimes but better planning was the best thing we did at speeding up our evenings.

I swear by my spreadsheet. One tab has a list of recipes we like, with all details of what book it’s from, what page and ingredients. The other tabs have the menu plans for 2-3 week periods at a time, you can just pull all the info through from the recipe list and it pre-populates a column with a shopping list! We do a weekly top up of fruit and veg but everything else is normally every 3 weeks.

The spreadsheet is on a google drive that my wife and I both have access to, on any of our devices.

It’s geeky but I love it, not only does it save time and food waste but we eat a much greater variety of stuff than before when we inevitably bought the same stuff at each shop, so when we went to the fridge on any given day, we ended up making the same things 90% of the time.

Oh and +1 to the comment about looking out recipes that can be done quickly. We have some great recipes that can be done in 10 minutes. Most of them are pretty straightforward DIY ones but the likes of Nigel Slater Simple Suppers or the Leon cook books have some excellent ideas for uber quick suppers.

Sounds like that spreadsheet should really be a relational database

Also you could intersperse it with quick recipes…
filled pasta (takes 1 min from fresh), sliced cherry tomatoes, chopped basil & toasted pine nuts (in a small pan, low heat takes 2 mins)

I only plan & buy meals 3 days in advance as we don’t have a big freezer and I find de-frosting/the time to cook from frozen a PITA (no microwave, so no nuked food)

But then I’m a benevolent dictator with meal times (I know what we all like and intersperse a variety) 😀

Maybe a spreadsheet is a little OCD but this whole idea of planning food and shopping is not boring.

What is boring is wasting time going shopping every day, spending extra cash, eating same old same old food and being stuck in the kitchen when there’s better things to be doing… this from the family that plan a week ahead, take packed lunches to work, dont spend much in the supermarket but eat pretty well. And have plenty of time for the fun stuff.

blimey

About the only planning i do is on a Friday, and that’s just to make sure I’ve got enough food and beer for the weekend, with a rough idea of what 3 meals will be.

@tenacious_doug I need your spreadsheet please 🙂

I swear by my spreadsheet.

Care to share, td?

We do quite a lot of batch cooking

ie Big pot of Chilli and freeze it in containers. Shepherds Pies etc etc

Slow cooker is very much a time saver in every way. Again batches

Ha, I tidied it up and removed 2 years of eating history from it, I left a few examples in so you get the idea. Just copy the recipe over from the recipe tab to the dated tabs, drag it across to copy all the details.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Mq75Ihph6pv6RWe_MUG_ATmLSxw8i5-BTlbzUhLuG_8/edit?usp=sharing

We’ve got the usual standbys;

– pies (cow pie is always a winner, but turning leftover roast chicken into chicken/leek/ham works too)
– stews
– chilli
– pasta sauces (ragu, some oven roasted tomato simple stuff etc, lasagnes)
– soups

What i like to do as well is make up various marinaded dishes and freeze half the marinade to finish up another night (curries, various thai/chinese stuff.. etc). That way you get quick tasty grub and dont get so bored.

Ahh but then you have to figure in the family likes dislikes…
Mrs DaRC_L = a bit fussy would like to be vegetarian but hates cooking
Eldest = on the autistic spectrum only likes spagbol, chilli, roast chicken (only visits once a month now)
Middle = lessy fussy but not keen on veggie (only visits when he’s off work now)
Youngest = a bit fussy particularly around certain textures, hates spicy, prefers bland northern european cooking
Me = not fussy, loves spicy, pretty meh on bland northern european cooking.

Curries & TexMex were my specialty before the other 4 turned up 🙄

I don’t think OCD means what you think it does.

It was a joke, not a medical diagnosis 😉

To the people scheduling meals in advance, what do you do if you don’t fancy whatever you’ve planned in the schedule?

To the people scheduling meals in advance, what do you do if you don’t fancy whatever you’ve planned in the schedule?

Force feed myself and the wife.

On a more serious note, just switch things up. Easy way is just to swap 2 recipes around on the plan as you know you still have everything you need, but at the end of the day I’ve still got full fridges and cupboards full of food that can make allsorts of stuff, and any number of shops within 5 minutes of my front door to stock up if I use the bits I needed for another day.
But I’d say we only change our minds once or twice a month at most.

Just get a slow cooker. Before you leave for work in the morning, literally just chuck the ingredients in, and turn it on. Minimum messing about. When you get back from work you open the for to be greeted by the aroma of something delicious already cooked. Plenty of suggestions here

Failing that, theres always the chippy 😀

To the people scheduling meals in advance, what do you do if you don’t fancy whatever you’ve planned in the schedule?

henry’s kebab van. 😳

Batch cooking all the way here.

We had to tone it down a bit though when it got to the point that Monday night became spag bol night to the extent we were discombobulated if there was any deviation. 😳

To the people scheduling meals in advance, what do you do if you don’t fancy whatever you’ve planned in the schedule?

FFS