Recipe Strategy

The recipes I like to cook for day to day eating and, by extension, the recipes on this site are designed around a few key principles that I find make cooking manageable. This is not to say that I won’t cook recipes outside of this scope, but they will be reserved for special occasions or when I feel like cooking primarily for enjoyment.

Core Principles

Recipes should be:

• Flexible, with the ability to substitute different ingredients. This has a few advantages:
  • The same basic recipe can result in a variety of different flavours, meaning less-boring food.
  • It’s easier to not waste food, since anything leftover from one meal can probably fit into another.
  • You can easily shop for seasonal items, adapt to different shops and so on.
  • It’s easy to adapt for dietary requirements.
• Healthy. I’m certainly not trying to design a top-of-the-line diet here, but I don’t want to have 21 deep fried meals per week either.
• Interesting. Sure it’s easy to throw some vegetables in a pot and boil the taste out, but do you really want to eat that every day?
• Storable once cooked. Making things with leftovers makes it much easier to manage and avoids wastage.

Recipe Categories

I divide recipes into the following categories:

• Very quick meals: usually these are my backup plans, in case I run out of time or energy for another option. They should use ingredients that keep well but may sacrifice on the healthiness a little bit and they probably won’t result in much in the way of leftovers.
• Quick meals: The middle ground - healthy, fairly easy to prepare, enough leftovers to get at least one extra meal out of it.
• Quantity meals: Recipes that are easy to make in larger quantities and will store well. These get you enough leftovers for 4+ future meals.
• Breakfast meals: I’m not sure why, but breakfasts are different to other meals.
• Snacks and desserts: pretty much what it says. Ideally these should be similar in properties to quantity meals.
• Emergency meals: for when you absolutely can’t force yourself to cook anything. Usually something that can be reheated from the freezer.

Meal Planning

My general strategy is:

• If there’s more than a couple of days worth of leftovers, use those first.
• If I have the time and energy, try to make a quantity meal.
• If I have less time/energy or there’s already 2 sets of leftovers from quantity meals, go for a quick meal.
• If I have no time/energy, go for leftovers.
• Otherwise go for a very quick meal.

To keep things interesting, I have some strategies for dealing with leftovers:

• Often I cook meals where there’s a carbohydrate part (eg rice) and a vegetable/protein part (eg curry). These can then be mixed up, eg use leftover curry but serve it with baked potatos.
• Adding different topping or sides can make the same core food quite different. For example:
  • Make a quick salad.
  • Put some leafy greens on top (even quicker salad).
  • Add some chutney, cheese, hummus, chilli, pasta sauce or other topping.
  • Re-cook the leftovers. For example leftover rice can be turned into a rice bake.
  • Mix up the meal times - if you had stir-fry for lunch one day, have it for dinner the next.
• Have more than one set of leftovers available. Just don’t get too many since they only last for so long.
• Freeze some of the leftovers and reheat once it’s not boring anymore.