Why We Should Stop Batch Cooking!

Batch cooking is a fantastic time saver during the week, but I often hear patients say that they’re reluctant to batch cook. 

Whether they don’t always feel like the particular meal planned for a particular night, or having the same thing multiple nights in a row gets old quickly, or spending hours cooking a huge batch of food on the weekend seems like a monstrous task that eats into our downtime… there are lots of reasons why batch cooking might not be so appealing… and I completely agree! 

Enjoying our food is so important, and if we’re stuck eating something we’re not in the mood for, or feel totally bored by the thought of having that same stew for the third night straight, there’s an alternative solution that works wonderfully.

It’s a bit like meal prep, but not the batch cooking kind. I like to refer to it as ‘partial meal prepping’.

So here’s the deal: as per regular meal prep, you can still plan the meals you’d like to have for the week ahead and buy everything you need for them. However, rather than pre-making said meals, choose elements from each meal that you can prep or cook ahead of time to save time during the week. 

For example, if you’re planning a roast vegetable salad, you could pre-cut the vegetables and store them in a container ready to cook, or even go ahead and roast them so that they’re ready to toss together. Then on that night there’s only a small amount of effort required to get the rest of the elements of that dish together. 

The beauty of this strategy is that there is flexibility. If you’re not feeling like that particular meal you’ve planned out on any given night, you can always transform it into something else that does sound appetising. For example, those veggies could go with a fillet of fish from the freezer instead or be blended into a soup. There are a myriad of options!

If this sounds like something you’d like to try then stay tuned. Next week, I’ll be posting a blog with more specific strategies on how to execute this and examples of foods to prep, so watch out for that!

Deeni