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Ensuring we provide tasty nutritious meals for our families when we lead such a busy life is taxing. When there’s work to do, extracurricular activities to manage, and the less-than-easy task of looking after your home, you may find it hard to get everything in balance, especially when it comes to the right meals, but this is where batch cooking comes to the rescue! Batch cooking is, very simply, cooking a larger portion of your favorite foods that you can store for future use, either in freezers or in the fridge for later in the week. Here are some of the best batch-cooked meals out there you can cook.
Sloppy Joes
One of the old-fashioned staples for most kids growing up, Sloppy Joes are easily freezable and when you create such a massive amount, a lot of people are concerned when they bring something out of the freezer that it either loses its texture and goes all runny, but this is nothing to be concerned about when it comes to Sloppy Joes because they are already sloppy in nature! If you feel they are too runny after you take them out of the freezer, just brown them off in the frying pan to reduce the liquid!
Casseroles
The great thing about having a slow cooker is that you can make meals with minimum effort. Another great benefit is that most of these meals can be portioned up and frozen. A little trick if you want to maximize freezer space is to not portion up less solid meals into Tupperware boxes, but instead, put them in freezer bags. This means that you may have to cut up the meat into smaller portions for it to maintain that liquidy consistency, but when you have more freezer space, you can get into the habit of batch-cooking a meal whenever you have some time spare. The great thing about batch-cooked meals is that they last at least up to six months in the freezer. Just make sure you put the date the meal was cooked on the Tupperware box or freezer bag!
Lasagna
One of those dishes that tastes amazing, in or out of the freezer. Lasagna is an amazing way for you to not just create a filling family staple, but is the perfect opportunity to load this dish with lots of vegetables. Your children may very well turn their noses up at the sight of vegetables, which is why you can benefit from making your own tomato sauce that has a wide variety of onions, carrots, zucchinis, peppers, and almost anything to create this amazing base. The benefit of this type of tomato sauce is that you can also freeze it, making short work of pasta dishes beyond lasagna, but spaghetti bolognese and even chili!
Ensuring we have an idea of the best batch-cooked meals we can portion up is critical because it means we’re not just working more effectively within the time constraints, but we’ve also got more opportunities to do the things that we want!