If you use this very useful cooking strategy you will find that you are able to save a lot of time. You can still cook great meals and maximise your eating pleasure and also reduce your cooking time.
I find the most useful strategy is to cook freezer friendly sauces and other basic items in bulk quantities and freeze them for later use. Things like my vegan meat sauce substitute or my mega tasty cheese sauce, or even Hollandaise sauce for Tofu Neapolitan.
My rationale is simple: that to make a gravy, or other sauce just for a single meal is a waste of time. That time can be better spent in embellishing and making more interesting other elements of the meal that you wouldn’t have time for if you had to make every element (the sauce etc) for every meal. Sort of “Cook once eat many times” in computer parlance.
Sauces that fall into this category are satay sauce, curry sauce, onion gravy, cheese sauce, mushroom sauce, tomato sauce, chilli mince sauce, meat sauce substitute, etc. They’re not all up here, yet, but they will be. (The same is true of beans and chick peas – pointless to cook chickpeas or beans for one meal! Do at least a kilo at a time and freeze in can sized lots. When you want some – either chuck a whole block in or break it up and put in what you need – for half the price!)
By using this very useful cooking strategy, you get the benefit of a delicious sauce that you made yourself, and so you know what’s in it! That’s so much better than a shop version – because it’s cooked to a taste and quality, and not to a price as shop bought ones are.
You can tweak the recipe to your liking as you go along by writing on it in pen. That’s why I keep paper & computer notes on all my recipes, so that I can adjust and update as I go along – incorporating new ideas, ingredients and techniques.
To this end, I keep all my recipes in word on the computer, and keep that latest hard paper copy on a plastic see through folder. That way, if I make an adjustment to the recipe, I can note it down on the sheet, then when it’s too messy, update the computer version and reprint the recipe to go back in the folder – a sort of continuous process of evolution!
Happy cooking.
