If you’re looking for family oriented budgeting solutions, I whole heartedly recommend batch cooking for families to save time and money.
Batch cooking works wonders for multiple reasons. The first being that you can get better pricing per weight or the multiple buy type offers if you are buying in larger amounts. This will be where the first saving is.
That will mean that if you were to divide the cost of the batch per mouths it feeds, the cost is going to end up lower.
But another bonus to the batch cooking method, is of course that it will save busy families like ours a significant amount of time and mental energy from the constant thinking of what to cook every bloody night, am I right?! It will also stop you feeling like you need to order take-away on those days you just can’t be bothered to cook anything from scratch.
Here are some of our favourite go-to batch meals. And remember the idea is to let them cool and then freeze them to use at a later date! So make sure you have some good freezer boxes ready to go!
Bolognese
Bolognese is a staple in our house. Mostly with spaghetti, but also sometimes with homemade, chunky chips or a jacket potato. The Italian in me LOVES a really good, slow cooked, rich Bolognese, although I’m sure any more Italian Italians would think using a jar sauce was sacrilege, haha!
Here’s how I quickly batch cook enough for LOADS of meals.
Ingredients
- 3 Onions (ALDI 3 Large Onions £1.29)
- 2.25kg Beef & Pork Mince (ALDI Beef & Pork Mince £2.85 750g)
- 4 Jars of Bolognese Sauce (ALDI Cucina Bolognese Sauce 500g £0.49)
- 2 Beef Stock Cubes (OXO Beef Stock Cubes £1.39)
Serve with
Either
- Spaghetti (ALDI everyday essentials spaghetti £0.20)
- Homemade Chunky Chips (ALDI Everyday Essentials Potatoes 2.5kg £0.89) & (ALDI Olive Oil 1 Ltr £2.19)
Method
- Heat a VERY large pan and add a small amount of oil.
- Dice the onions and add them to the pan. Cook them for a few minutes until softened (but not brown).
- Add your mince, making sure to keep breaking it up as it browns. Fry for a while until it’s starting to look mostly browned/cooked.
- Sprinkle over the beef stock and stir.
- Add in the jars of bolognese sauce, making sure add a little water to each jar, shake it to get the remainders of sauce out and pour the water into the pan too. (Don’t add tons of water, we aren’t filling the jars to the top, we are simply rinsing out the extra sauce in the jars, but if your sauce doesn’t seem enough for the amount of mince, add a little extra water).
- Stir, and leave to boil
- Once boiling, lower to a simmer and leave the lid off of the pan.
- Leave to simmer for 1-2 hours on low. This will really intensify the flavour and boil out any extra water!
Thai Green Chicken Curry
Everyone in the family loves Thai Green Curry, kids included. It probably helps that they’re all baby sweetcorn mad!
Ingredients
- 2kg Skinless, Boneless Chicken Thigh (ASDA Chicken Thighs 1kg £4.99)
- 8 Tbsp Thai Green Curry Paste (ASDA Thai Green Curry Paste £1.10)
- 1.6l Tinned Coconut Milk (Island Sun Coconut Milk 400ml £0.59)
- Sweetcorn – add as much or little as you like (ASDA Frozen for Freshness Sweetcorn 1kg £1)
- Green Beans – again, add as much or as little as you like. (ASDA Frozen for Freshness Green Beans 750g £0.62)
Serve with
- White Rice (ASDA Long Grain Micro Rice £0.35)
Method
- Heat a large pan and fry chicken till it’s mostly browned.
- Add the curry paste and stir.
- Add in your beans and sweetcorn, and then pour in your coconut milk and stir until all combined.
- Bring to a boil, and then leave to simmer on low for an hour.
- Serve with rice!
Meatball Ragu
I haven’t yet met a kid who doesn’t love meatballs, even if they’re switched for vegan ones at times.
Ingredients
- 1.9kg Meatballs (ASDA Frozen Beef Meatballs 640g 3 for £8)
- 6 Jars of Bolognese Sauce (ASDA Smartprice Bolognese Sauce £0.39)
- Sweetcorn – Optional (ASDA Frozen for Freshness Sweetcorn 1kg £1)
Serve with
Either
- Spaghetti (ALDI everyday essentials spaghetti £0.20)
- Homemade Chunky Chips (ALDI Everyday Essentials Potatoes 2.5kg £0.89) & (ALDI Olive Oil 1 Ltr £2.19)
Method
- Heat very large pan, add oil.
- Add all of your meatballs, and fry. Make sure to keep stirring, but gently as meatballs love to fall to pieces. If you have a Ninja foodie or a large oven tray, you can pre bake them instead to prevent them falling to pieces.
- Once they’re mostly browned, pour over the sauce, using the same water method I mentioned in the bolognese recipe to clear out the jars.
- If adding sweetcorn, do that now.
- Bring to the boil, and then with the lid off of the pan (sorry in advance for all the wall splats), leave to simmer for 1-2 hours. It will intensify the flavours and make it so much richer!
Mince & Gravy
This is, most basically put, the sauce part of a cottage pie, which means you have a ready made filling for cottage pie, if that’s what you choose to do with it. In our family we make the mince filling and just serve with mash, because we like to cut down on time where we can (and pot washing).
Ingredients
- 3 Onions (ALDI 3 Large Onions £1.29)
- 2.25kg Beef & Pork Mince (ALDI Beef & Pork Mince £2.85 750g)
- Carrots, Peas & Sweetcorn – As much or as little as you like (ALDI Carrot, Peas & Sweetcorn Frozen £1.09)
- Kettle Boiled Water
- Beef Gravy (ALDI Quixo for Meat Gravy £0.79)
Serve With
- Buttery Mash (ALDI Everyday Essentials Potatoes 2.5kg £0.89) and (ALDI Beautifully Buttery Spread £0.69)
- Broccoli (ALDI Broccoli £0.47)
Method
- Heat a very large pan and add a little oil.
- Dice onions and add to pan. Fry until soft but not browned.
- Add mince, and keep breaking it apart as it’s browning.
- Once the mince is almost fully brown, add the carrots, peas and sweetcorn and then cover everything with boiling water, until just covered.
- Cook for around 30 minutes with a lid on. Keep stirring to make sure nothing sticks to the bottom.
- After 30 minutes, gradually add your gravy granules. There is no set amount of gravy to add, which is why it needs doing gradually as you stir. You want to get it rich and full of flavour, but not so thick it’s no longer a sauce!
- Serve with your mash straight away, or turn it into a cottage pie by adding to an oven dish, topping with the mash, sprinkling cheese on top and baking for 40 minutes at 180c.
We also LOVE to batch cook Chilli once the weather starts to get cooler, but wordpress starts to stall after a certain amount of typing, haha! Perhaps I’ll work on some seasonal batch cooking posts soon!
Does your family batch cook? Which meals are your go tos?
L xxx
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