Читать книгу The Batch Lady - Suzanne Mulholland - Страница 26

USING CUPS

Throughout this book you will see that the measurements for ingredients are listed in cups first. I use cups for one reason only – they make cooking faster! They can also be used for stirring and even serving up a meal. I have also included gram and millimetre measurements in my ingredients lists, but for reference volume equivalents for cups are listed, right:

 1 cup/240ml/16 tablespoons

 ¾ cup/180ml/12 tablespoons

 ⅔ cup/160ml/11 tablespoons

 ½ cup/120ml/8 tablespoons

 ⅓ cup/80ml/5½ tablespoons

 ¼ cup/60ml/4 tablespoons

PORTIONING MEALS WITH CUPS

Doubling or tripling a recipe is a great way of working when you are batch cooking, and is something I recommend, but, when faced with an enormous vat of food, it can be difficult to gauge how many people it will actually serve.

Using measuring cups to portion out meals can help with this. The general rule is that one level cup of scoopable food (Bolognese/curry/stew etc.) will feed one adult, whereas half a cup should be enough to feed a child under 10 years old.

FROZEN VERSUS FRESH

As I covered earlier in the introduction, I am a big fan of ‘cheat’ ingredients to save on time. My most commonly used are frozen onions, garlic, sliced peppers and spinach. If you would rather use fresh, simply use the chart below to work out how much of each ingredient you will need.

Frozen Ingredient	Amount	Fresh Equivalent
Frozen, chopped onions	1 cup	1 onion, finely chopped
Frozen, chopped red onions	1 cup	1 red onion, finely chopped
Frozen, chopped garlic	1 tsp	1 clove, crushed
Frozen, sliced peppers	1 cup	1 pepper, sliced
Frozen, chopped spinach	2 cubes	½ bag fresh spinach
Frozen, sliced carrots	1 cup	2 carrots, sliced