The Batch Lady. Suzanne Mulholland
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Название: The Batch Lady
Автор: Suzanne Mulholland
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Кулинария
isbn: 9780008373238
isbn:
If a meal contains spices, I have erred on the side of caution and opted for delicate rather than ‘blow-your-head-off’ hot, as my meals are designed to be family friendly. If you like more spice, simply adjust the levels to your tastes. As a general rule, it’s good to remember that spice can always be added, but never removed!
WORKING IN PAIRS
All of the recipes in this book are paired-up with another. These are dishes that lend themselves to being prepared together, and throughout the recipe methods you will find tips on how to save time by jumping between the two. Sound complicated? I promise you it’s not! Each of the meals can also be made as a standalone dish, serving 4–6 people, so it’s up to you if you want to batch it with the other meal.
Once you’ve got the hang of batching two recipes together, you can start doubling up and making four full meals at once!
ODD ONES OUT
When pairing recipes, it sometimes makes sense to match a savoury dish with a sweet, or a meat dish with a veggie. If you take my Plait recipes as an example, you’ll see that both recipes use the same technique, which is why they are paired together, but this does mean that you’ll find a sweet recipe in the middle of the meat chapter! To help you identify this, all of the recipes are colour-coded and marked with a symbol in the top corner so that you know exactly what kind of recipe you are looking at. The symbols are:
TO COOK. TO FREEZE. TO COOK FROM FROZEN
Every dish in this book can be cooked fresh, or made in advance and stored in the freezer until needed. At the bottom of each recipe you will see the headings ‘To Cook’, ‘To Freeze’ and ‘To Cook from Frozen’, so all you need to do is follow the instructions according to how you want to prepare the meal. Simple!
Some meals can be cooked directly from frozen and others need to be defrosted first. Full instructions on the various ways of defrosting meals can be found here, but the simplest way is simply to transfer it from the freezer to the fridge the evening before you want to serve it and leave to defrost slowly overnight.
NO-COOK MEALS
Throughout this book you will see no-cook meals – these are meals that are assembled from entirely uncooked or frozen ingredients and then stored in bags in the freezer until needed. No cooking required! (At least until the day you want to serve them.)
The benefit of these meals is that they take very little time to prepare and freeze. Preparing the food in this way also means that when you take the bag out of the freezer, the food is being cooked for the first time – great for things like fish and chicken that can dry out when reheated.
I often pair a no-cook meal with a cooked meal, as you can easily prepare your no-cook meal while your other recipe is bubbling away on the stove or baking in the oven. For example, while your Luxury Seafood Chowder is simmering away, you can spend 10 minutes assembling a no-cook Easy-but-Luxury Fish Pie to pop straight in the freezer. The two dishes use similar ingredients, so the extra prep is minimal, and you have created two full meals in the same time it would have taken to make just the chowder alone.
THREE WAYS WITH …
Within the recipe chapters you’ll see features titled ‘Three Ways With …’ – these pages show you how, with a little bit of additional prep, one meal can be served in three different ways. There are some recipes that lend themselves particularly well to this treatment, and in each chapter throughout the book you’ll find a few. A great example of this is my recipe for Pulled Pork here. Cooking one large shoulder of pork will yield enough meat for several meals, so it’s nice to have different options for how to serve it. Here you’ll see that one delicious batch of Pulled Pork can be mixed with sweetcorn, spring onions and cheese and used as a delicious topping for baked sweet potatoes, spooned into fluffy brioche buns and served with a topping of apple sauce and crunchy fresh apple or spiced up with jalapenos and used as a delicious filling for quesadillas.
The recipes for sauces in the Sides & Sauces chapter are another example of where this feature is used, as once you’ve made your Basic Tomato Sauce, Pesto or Enchilada Pasta Sauce, it’s useful to have a variety of options on how to use them. In this way you’ll be able to use the recipes in this book time and again and they’ll feel fresh and different every time.
Are you ready to move to ultimate batcher status? Once you are used to using the paired-up recipes and doubling up on ingredients, the next stage is to move on to making even more meals with similar ingredients all at the same time.
At the end of every recipe chapter you will find a special section on how to cook 10 meals in 1 hour. The only exceptions to this are the Sides & Sauces and Desserts chapters – mainly because I couldn’t be trusted to have 10 desserts at once!
Though it sounds like an impossible task, once you’ve got the hang of cooking this way, you’ll never go back. And I’ll tell you a secret, it’s actually pretty simple! With a little organization, you will be amazed how many family meals you can make in such a short space of time.
The meals in these sections are all made using similar base ingredients, so you probably won’t want to eat them every night in succession, but if you put two in the fridge for the week ahead and the rest in the freezer, you’ll be well stocked with tasty meals that are a ready to go at a moment’s notice – and all with just 1 hour’s investment of your time!
Here’s how it works: In each of the four sections (Poultry, Meat, Fish and Veg), I give you a list of ingredients for each recipe, a full shopping list for the entire batch and one long method to make the five СКАЧАТЬ