Читать книгу The Batch Lady - Suzanne Mulholland - Страница 16

TO COOK. TO FREEZE. TO COOK FROM FROZEN

Every dish in this book can be cooked fresh, or made in advance and stored in the freezer until needed. At the bottom of each recipe you will see the headings ‘To Cook’, ‘To Freeze’ and ‘To Cook from Frozen’, so all you need to do is follow the instructions according to how you want to prepare the meal. Simple!

Some meals can be cooked directly from frozen and others need to be defrosted first. Full instructions on the various ways of defrosting meals can be found here, but the simplest way is simply to transfer it from the freezer to the fridge the evening before you want to serve it and leave to defrost slowly overnight.

NO-COOK MEALS

Throughout this book you will see no-cook meals – these are meals that are assembled from entirely uncooked or frozen ingredients and then stored in bags in the freezer until needed. No cooking required! (At least until the day you want to serve them.)

The benefit of these meals is that they take very little time to prepare and freeze. Preparing the food in this way also means that when you take the bag out of the freezer, the food is being cooked for the first time – great for things like fish and chicken that can dry out when reheated.

I often pair a no-cook meal with a cooked meal, as you can easily prepare your no-cook meal while your other recipe is bubbling away on the stove or baking in the oven. For example, while your Luxury Seafood Chowder is simmering away, you can spend 10 minutes assembling a no-cook Easy-but-Luxury Fish Pie to pop straight in the freezer. The two dishes use similar ingredients, so the extra prep is minimal, and you have created two full meals in the same time it would have taken to make just the chowder alone.

THREE WAYS WITH …

Within the recipe chapters you’ll see features titled ‘Three Ways With …’ – these pages show you how, with a little bit of additional prep, one meal can be served in three different ways. There are some recipes that lend themselves particularly well to this treatment, and in each chapter throughout the book you’ll find a few. A great example of this is my recipe for Pulled Pork here. Cooking one large shoulder of pork will yield enough meat for several meals, so it’s nice to have different options for how to serve it. Here you’ll see that one delicious batch of Pulled Pork can be mixed with sweetcorn, spring onions and cheese and used as a delicious topping for baked sweet potatoes, spooned into fluffy brioche buns and served with a topping of apple sauce and crunchy fresh apple or spiced up with jalapenos and used as a delicious filling for quesadillas.

The recipes for sauces in the Sides & Sauces chapter are another example of where this feature is used, as once you’ve made your Basic Tomato Sauce, Pesto or Enchilada Pasta Sauce, it’s useful to have a variety of options on how to use them. In this way you’ll be able to use the recipes in this book time and again and they’ll feel fresh and different every time.