How to plan a cook day

Pick dishes that share ingredients

Three dishes make a good cook day: enough to fill the freezer, few enough to keep track of. Choose them so they share a shop and don’t all need the oven. If it’s your first, batch cooking for beginners covers the basics.

In the example, all three start with onions and garlic, the bolognese and the chilli both use tins of chopped tomatoes, and all three cook in a pot on the hob, so the oven stays free.

• Shared ingredients mean bigger packs and less left over at the end.
• One oven dish at most. A lasagne or a cottage pie is fine; two is a queue.
• Mix them up: something for pasta, something for rice, something you’d otherwise order in.
• Leave out what doesn’t freeze. Eggs and cream don’t, so carbonara is made on the night.

How many portions

Work it out from the nights, not the recipe. Portions are the people who eat, times the nights you want from the freezer. In the example, each dish is one batch of 8 portions.

Children’s portions are smaller than adults’, and a baby’s smaller again. Nomstash plans portions per person and counts them in the freezer by size, adult, child and baby, so two child portions aren’t mistaken for dinner for two adults.

Size the containers to how you eat. Two portions suits a couple; a family of four might want fours. Single portions are handy for lunches and for whoever eats late.

One shop

Shop the day before, so everything’s in when the pots go on. Write one list for all three dishes and add the shared items together, so the onions are one line, not three.

Here’s the example shop. Nomstash builds this list from the plan and prices it at your supermarket from live prices, so you know what the cook day costs before you leave the house.

The timeline

The example cook day, by the clock. Your times will move; the order shouldn’t.

1. Sat 09:30

   Shop

   One list, one trip, the day before. If the cook day slips, the meat can go in the freezer up to midnight on its use-by date, as the freezing rules allow.

2. Sun 12:00

   Pots on

   Chop every onion for all three dishes in one go, then the garlic. Start whichever dish needs longest on the hob and get the others going beside it. Each recipe is scaled to the portions you planned, so the pots come out the right size for the containers.

   

3. Sun 15:30

   Off the heat

   Take the pots off and portion everything into the containers. The clock starts now: it all needs to be cool and in the fridge or freezer within one to two hours.

4. Sun 16:30

   Labels

   One label per container: dish, date made and portions. Twelve containers, twelve labels.

5. Sun 17:15

   Freezer

   Lids on and into the freezer, with anything older moved to the front. 24 portions in, an hour and three-quarters after the pots came off. Kettle on.

Cooling and freezing

This is the part with rules. They come from the Food Standards Agency, and every one of them, with its source, is in freezing, defrosting and reheating safely.

In this example the rice and pasta are cooked fresh on the night, so only the sauces go in the freezer.

Labelling

A label needs three things: what it is, when it was made and how much is in it. Anything else is a bonus.

Nomstash makes a label for every container from the plan, so all twelve are ready when the pots are. Here’s how Nomstash goes from the plan to the label.

The month after

Twelve containers, eaten oldest first, between the nights you want to cook. Here’s the fortnight after the example cook day.

Eight of the twelve containers are eaten in the first fortnight. The other four carry on into the next, alongside the second cook day.

The night before each freezer dinner, move the container to the fridge. That’s the safest way to defrost, and dinner is ready to heat when you get in. Nomstash reminds you each evening which container to move.