Batch cooking! Any ideas?

[toffeeboffin]

So I am trying to organised and batch cook all my week night meals on Sunday. Saving time and money are my goals! Here's my list for this week:

Big batch chilli ( one night with rice, wrapped up into burritos with cheese mid-week)
Beef stew (leftovers for lunch if poss)
Baked potatoes (lunch and/or with beans etc mid-week)
Chicken Parmagiana (great for lunches)
Roasted veg(to eat with the chicken p, beef stew or blended into soup)

Anyone any good ideas for other stuff? Last week I did cabbage rolls which were nice. Also do the usual bolognaise but trying to avoid too much pasta.

Today I made lasagne, mac cheese, meatballs and chicken stock.

I'm marking my place

Lasagne and cottage pie get made in advance here :) Marking my place as I need ideas!

I make a huge batch of mince then add different things to it and make chilli, cottage pie or savoury mince and potatoes.

Regulars that end up in our freezer

• chicken and vegetable curries
• beef stew
• sausage casserole
• chilli with beans
• bolognese sauce
• pork and apple casserole
• chorizo, pepper, chickpea stew

I never precook the starch element, just the sauce part. Takes no time to freshly boil some pasta, rice or a few spuds during which the sauce can be reheating. Besides which I think defrosted pasta is bloody awful. :)

Thanks for all the suggestions, masking a batch of mince is a good one too. Cottage pie is great, baby can eat it too. Bit weird as where I live they put sweet corn in cottage pie!?

Was thinking of making bean burritos too, but I think the tortillas would go soggy if re-heated? Eaten them in restaurants but never made at home. I might try making the bean chilli separately and then just put it together quickly on the night.

Another meal we include is home made soup, pate and cheese and baguette. Quick and easy for Monday night!

If you can bear to delve into Pinterest, there's sooo many ideas under "once a month cooking" or oamc.

Also I used to have a great book called Frozen Assets.
It gave you a base recipie, say mince beef. You cook 2 kg of it with onions then split it up into 4 and use it to make 4 different meals. Baked penne, bolognese, lasagna and chilli for example.
Then she would list chicken dishes, or ones based around a tomato base sauce. It was really well laid out and easy to follow.

Also if you make your own burgers and meatballs they are a great standby in freezer.

Sweetcorn in cottage pie?! I used to have it in bolognaise though so I can't really complain

"It gave you a base recipe, say mince beef. You cook 2 kg of it with onions then split it up into 4 and use it to make 4 different meals." I'm a veggie but I do this with vegetarian mince. It works really well! I keep a big mixing bowl to the side and use just one big pan for all four meals. You can bulk out each part as well quite easily with veg. Carrots are good for bulking out mince-based meals, as are courgettes and mushrooms.

I usually do it with bolognaise sauce, cottage pie, lasagne sauce and chilli.

My friend freezes her bolognaise mince for lasagne in flat freezer bags so they pop straight into the lasagne dish. Not sure if it's madness or genius.

Turkey burgers, meatloaf, I also chop all veg needed for certain meals and label it so all I need to do is pull out relevant meat/ veg bags. Particularly useful if making a stew I just get bags out of frezer night before and chuck in slow cooker.

I using the hairy bikers diet book has lots of lovely and quick recipes in and no what I call poncey/costly ingredients.

I love filling the freezer with pre cooked food, makes me feel virtuous.

Lilybensmum, that's a good idea to chop all veg, saves time on washing up too, always a bonus!

Will look into the Hairy Bikers book, heard it mentioned loads on here.

Good idea about freezing burgers etc, especially once it's warm enough to start bbq ing again... Can't come soon enough!

Meatballs
Curry
Mince ragú
Veg (blended) ragú to use as a base for pizzas or things like tuna pasta
Chilli
Lasagne
Stews/Casseroles

I also freeze things in portions so for example I'll grate a whole block of parmesan cheese and then portion it into small bags and just take one out if I want to make a carbonara (sooo quick to make) I split a big bag of frozen mozzerella into 3 smaller portions and freeze, then use that (and the ragú) for pizza. I make up extra pizza dough and wrap in clingfilm and freeze so basically the entire makings of the pizza can be taken out of freezer in the morning and will only take 10 mins to make a pizza that evening. If we have burgers, which would maybe only be once every 10 days, I'll pop the unused burger buns in the freezer so that they don't go to waste. I pour leftover red wine (not that it happens too often!) into icecube bags and freeze so I can add to sauces etc. I also freeze breadcrumbs, chopped onions, gravy and all sauces, basically most things that I've made too much of or have left over will be frozen.

sausage casserole, chilli, spag bol, thai currys, indian currys, ratatouille (for eating with jacket potatoes).

i also make turkey and lemon meat balls, and pork sesame and ginger meat balls. freezer always has a bag of either/or of these for quick meals. They are small, so take about as much time to cook as the pasta/noodles then can have a sauce thrown over them.

turkey ones are great with lemon juice and cream cheese and rocket tossed over spaghetti/taglietelle, the pork ones are lovely stir fried with veggies (oak choi/lettuce/cabbage and a bit of chicken stock).