The Batch Lady. Suzanne Mulholland

Чтение книги онлайн.

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS BATCHING?

       To a lot of people, batching meals can seem complicated at first, but it is actually a far simpler way of cooking. With a little bit of planning, you can save yourself time and money every week, allowing you to spend more of your time on the things you enjoy. Here’s how …

      BRINGING TIME MANAGEMENT HOME

      On the surface, the phrase ‘time management’ sounds very impersonal and businesslike, and not at all like something that you want to worry about in your lovely, cozy home. In fact, the whole point of introducing this technique at home is to make more time for the fun stuff. Freeing you up to spend more time playing with the kids, more time snuggling up with a glass of wine and a good book, more time spent with friends and family. It’s about giving yourself time to exhale and process, and in today’s relentlessly busy world, that can only be a good thing. In practice, time management is simply looking at the many tasks that take up your time and working out how they can be streamlined to free you up for other stuff. The stuff that matters.

      This method can be applied to everything from the way you get dressed in the morning, how you organize your laundry or do the housework to what you are making for dinner in the evening. Streamlining my life like this has saved my sanity and allowed me time to feel like me again – rather than some kind of cooking and cleaning automaton!

      I apply this approach to every aspect of my life but the thing that has made the biggest difference, by far, is time managing the food that I cook for my family on a daily basis. Something that used to dominate every evening can now be accomplished in just an hour a week. Cooking in this way has allowed me to reclaim my evenings and my enjoyment of cooking – and it can do the same for you!

      HEADSPACE NOT PERFECTIONISM

      Batching is not about perfectionism. It’s about headspace.

      I get asked by people all the time if I’m a perfectionist, to which I usually respond with a burst of laughter, because I am far from this. Being organized and managing my time is not about everything being perfect, it’s about giving myself a break from constantly thinking about those chores that have to be done day after day. Instead, my week is planned and I feel freer to enjoy the fun things, like spending time with my family and friends.

THE BENEFITS OF BATCHING

       Batch cooking isn’t just about saving time in the kitchen – it also saves time on all the related chores like planning, shopping and washing up, too.

      How many of us get to three in the afternoon and start to panic about what we’re going to have for dinner that evening? We swing by the supermarket on the way home and browse the shelves for inspiration, torn between the convenience of a pizza or ready meal and the pressure we feel to put something homemade and nutritious on the table.

      My way of cooking does away with this stress. With a little planning, you can streamline your shopping so that you can buy all the food for the week in one go. All of the planning is done in advance, so your daily mental load is lightened and you are only buying the food that you really need, meaning that there is no waste, all of which is far better for you, your wallet and the environment!

      When it comes to cooking, you can pretty much batch anything – if I’m going to be making a mess in the kitchen, I’d rather make five meals at once and have one big mess to tidy up as opposed to having to clean down the kitchen every night of the week. If the recipes are made using a lot of the same ingredients and techniques, all the better.

      The old-fashioned image of batch cooking is often centered around creating a huge vat of one meal, say a large pot of soup or a huge curry that you will be eating for weeks, but, for me, batch cooking is about cooking food that uses similar ingredients to create very different meals. For example, in one batch you can create a Moussaka and some Lamb & Feta Burgers, or even a Potato Dauphinoise and a Spanish Omelette – recipes that use many of the same ingredients, but offer great variety in your weekly meal plan.