Batch cooking ideas please

tesuhoha

If you can eat liver its very cheap. I bought a pack from Asda last week for £1 and you get a lot of meat out of it. A palatable way of eating it is fry two chopped onions until they are brown, add the liver pieces and fry until brown on the outside. Add flour to soak up juices then add a little water and stock cube/Oxo/bisto to make a gravy. This is nice with mashed potato and cabbage. If children get used to eating this kind of thing from a young age they don't get fussy about it. Very nutritious too.

Another cheap meal I make is cauliflower cheese and brown rice. Economy cheese as long as its quite strong can be used to make a nice cheese sauce. Boil the cauliflower for about 10 mins, cover it with cheese sauce and some grated cheese and bake in the oven until golden brown. In the meantime cook the brown rice until it is soft and has absorbed the liquid. Delicious. Even cheaper than that is macaroni cheese and kids love that.

I also used to make a cheese and potato pie. Slice an onion, boil it with some potatoes, drain and then mash with butter/margarine and milk, then place half of it into an oven dish, layer on some grated cheese, put the rest of the mash mixture on top and some more grated cheese on top of that. Bake in the oven till golden. My kids used to love that with some chicken nuggets.

tesuhoha

For chilli con carne I would make it like this. Fry onions and garlic, fry mince, add tin toms or fresh tomatoes chopped, tin kidney beans, , add stock cube/oxo, add a few drops of chilli sauce from a bottle of chilli sauce and leave to simmer. You could put fresh chillies in but they might be expensive, also you could put in other veg such as green/red peppers.

zippychick

I looked up some links which should help

Batch cooking ideas please

Meal building blocks for the freezer - this thread is good for "transforming" meals

Cooking for the freezer

Nutritionally good meals for the freezer

Help - cooking from frozen

HM ready meals

Have a good read and we will merge this later on

Zip

Purplekylie22

If u make chilli, follow as tesuhoha said but add in some Cumin ( i never bought cumin before but when i made my own chilli i bought a jar and from the first smell I know it was what i loved in chilli) when u add the tinned tomes and in the last 10 minutes of cooking add a teeny square of dark chocoalte, it really brings the flavour out well. I usually make it with quorn mince as i really dont eat much meat, but i make it with 3 or 4 tines of chopped tomatoes and usually have enough to feed the family plus freeze an extra 2 - 3 meals. You can add some red lentils into it as well if u prefer it less saucy to bulk it out cheaply.

One of the cheapest things i make often for my kids that they LOVE is toad in the hole. 2 eggs, 1 cup of flour, 1 cup of milk and a good pinch of salt is enough to make 2 loads of batter or one really big load! Just heat some oil up in a deep oven try, mix up your batter and defrost your sausages (I buy big frozen bags) when the oil is hot pour in the batter and arrange sausage then straight in the oven till its puffy and yummy I intend to try it next time where i do that with half the batter and with the other half arrange the toad in the hole (only without heating up oil first) and open freezing it, so next time i can just stick it in the oven when it gets close to tea time.

TheThriftyScrumpers

If you do get your slow cooker back, I like to cook a whole chicken in mine. You just put a little oil on a piece of kitchen paper and wipe around the inside of the slow cooker and then put the chicken in. You can brown the chicken first in a pan with some oil and butter but I don't bother. I leave mine on low for about 8 hours. The chicken is really moist and it's easy to strip off all the meat. I usually do a roast the first day, then either a curry or a pie the next day and use the rest for sandwiches.

I also buy joints of gammon and do them in the slow cooker. You just put some liquid in the slow cooker, either water or apple juice (enough so it comes about half way up the joint) and leave all day. I then slice it really thinly and use for sandwich meat.

You can freeze portions of the cooked chicken or gammon so you don't have to eat it all at once.

You can get gammon and whole chickens in the Mr T 3 meats for £10 offer.

Hope this helps

chocolatepennyfarthing

Always try to bulk cook things like chilli, spag bol etc easy just to get them out of freezer when family are coming in at different times for meals. Does anyone have any healthy recipees that I can do this with. Getting a bit bored of the same old meals but need to eat a bit more healthy. Do like quite spicy/ tasty food so any along those lines would be great.

LJM

i tend to bulk cook curries/shep pies/chilli/spag bols/lasagne and meat pies alot of the time

chocolatepennyfarthing

Any good curry recipees LJM?

kersplatt

I make my pizza bases from scratch and freeze the dough seperately in freezer bags which then defrost on the work surface in 4-6 hrs ready to made into pizzas for the kids.

I also make soups, quiches, curries, pies, lasagne to freeze. I find that the bbc good food website has a very good recipe for lamb saag but the price of lamb is prohibitive so I tend to use chicken thighs instead which work equally well and it is one of the best curries I've tasted. I do cheat both for time and money and tend to use puree'd garlic, ginger and chilli and it doesn't diminish the taste imo.

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/4361/lamb-saag

kersplatt

I also make this http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/72617/chickpeas-with-tomatoes-and-spinach

Veggie curry which is lovely as well. I often use frozen spinach to make it cheaper. It freezes well and I make homemade naans to go with it