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Efficient Cooking
Jun. 8th, 2011 07:38 pmFirst: please note that i am not actually doing any of this; I just think it'd be a good idea.
Assuming one has planned, sourced recipes, and made lists for a week's meals, there are other factors once can do to make putting dinner on the table faster and probably easier. (I believe that pre-planning, making a list, and shopping once per week is a HUGE tiime saver, and if you do nothing else, try that!)
One obvious thing: do the prep for several meals at once. For example: for us, it is very rare that some part of any given meal does not start out with sauteing onions, and often with adding garlic toward the end. There is no reason not to do all of this at once, and use an appropriate amount of the stuff in subsequent dishes.
A similar thing can be done with many other things; pre-cooking rice; blanching sturdier veg; etc. Depending how far one wanted to go, once could spend a few hours making "kits" for most of the rest of the meals for the week, with a lot of the prep done ahead of time- and more efficiently, since one would be sauteing a week's worth of onions rather than 1 per day.
And even that isn't getting into things that can be totally made ahead- if one is cooking a stew in the oven, one can also cook a pot roast. Some of this would need to be frozen; some not.
Now, I'm not that keen on doing this myself. I rather like wandering into the kitchen each day and starting to chop and saute an onion or 2! But it's really inefficient in all kinds of ways, and at times it'd be kinda nice to have a vat of sauteed, slightly caramelized onions at hand, ready for, say, a quarter cup or so to go into the latest batch of brown rice.
So: for efficiency: plan the menus; see what ingredients and prep overlap; pre-cook those as much as possible (peppers, onions, hot peppers, etc. can be done separately or together, depending on recipes; If I were doing a whole bunch, I think I'd do each veg separately and then combine them into recipe-focused medleys for use on the day).
it would also not be hard to make notes of any pre-prep that needed to be done closer to the actual meal- like, today, I lightly salted the steak in the early afternoon, wrapped it up again, and stuck it back in the fridge to dry-brine. I would not have wanted to do that earlier, but it needed to be done at least an hour before cooking. Similarly, the same treatment for a roast should be started several days ahead of time.
I guess ideally, one would do a flow-chart for the week.
Now: I'm not likely to do that for myself; my catch-as-catch-can approach of notes scribbled on scrap paper is working OK for me, mostly.
But: if I were doing a personal chef gig- I would look to ways to do this, and I'd have a list of Things to Do for every damn day that made pulling the fuds together easy and really home-made- and NOT simply pre-preparing a bunch of stuff that got frozen and then nuked. Some things are fine with that; others are NOT, and A Plan that is not very demanding in time or effort would be a fairly nifty approach, I think.
But- not really my are; I like metals enough that I am not planning to abandon them for cooking. I guess it's that watching the "chef" reality shows, and thinking about kitchen efficiency for a home cook instead of a chef, is rather a fascinating intellectual exercise.
Assuming one has planned, sourced recipes, and made lists for a week's meals, there are other factors once can do to make putting dinner on the table faster and probably easier. (I believe that pre-planning, making a list, and shopping once per week is a HUGE tiime saver, and if you do nothing else, try that!)
One obvious thing: do the prep for several meals at once. For example: for us, it is very rare that some part of any given meal does not start out with sauteing onions, and often with adding garlic toward the end. There is no reason not to do all of this at once, and use an appropriate amount of the stuff in subsequent dishes.
A similar thing can be done with many other things; pre-cooking rice; blanching sturdier veg; etc. Depending how far one wanted to go, once could spend a few hours making "kits" for most of the rest of the meals for the week, with a lot of the prep done ahead of time- and more efficiently, since one would be sauteing a week's worth of onions rather than 1 per day.
And even that isn't getting into things that can be totally made ahead- if one is cooking a stew in the oven, one can also cook a pot roast. Some of this would need to be frozen; some not.
Now, I'm not that keen on doing this myself. I rather like wandering into the kitchen each day and starting to chop and saute an onion or 2! But it's really inefficient in all kinds of ways, and at times it'd be kinda nice to have a vat of sauteed, slightly caramelized onions at hand, ready for, say, a quarter cup or so to go into the latest batch of brown rice.
So: for efficiency: plan the menus; see what ingredients and prep overlap; pre-cook those as much as possible (peppers, onions, hot peppers, etc. can be done separately or together, depending on recipes; If I were doing a whole bunch, I think I'd do each veg separately and then combine them into recipe-focused medleys for use on the day).
it would also not be hard to make notes of any pre-prep that needed to be done closer to the actual meal- like, today, I lightly salted the steak in the early afternoon, wrapped it up again, and stuck it back in the fridge to dry-brine. I would not have wanted to do that earlier, but it needed to be done at least an hour before cooking. Similarly, the same treatment for a roast should be started several days ahead of time.
I guess ideally, one would do a flow-chart for the week.
Now: I'm not likely to do that for myself; my catch-as-catch-can approach of notes scribbled on scrap paper is working OK for me, mostly.
But: if I were doing a personal chef gig- I would look to ways to do this, and I'd have a list of Things to Do for every damn day that made pulling the fuds together easy and really home-made- and NOT simply pre-preparing a bunch of stuff that got frozen and then nuked. Some things are fine with that; others are NOT, and A Plan that is not very demanding in time or effort would be a fairly nifty approach, I think.
But- not really my are; I like metals enough that I am not planning to abandon them for cooking. I guess it's that watching the "chef" reality shows, and thinking about kitchen efficiency for a home cook instead of a chef, is rather a fascinating intellectual exercise.
