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Comfort Food: Rachael Ray’s top 30-Minute Meals“Rachael Ray recently talked to the Boston Globe about why you should never cook a meal for only one person. She was single for a long time before meeting her husband John and always said that she never cooked for one. She made a recipe for 4 and lived off the leftovers.”
Usually, I make five portions and I’m all set for the working week. If you don’t want the same thing five days in a row, four is good to repeat the dish once a week.
Ignoring fluctuations in the number of days in a month - and there are likely to be some days when you eat out or grab a take out - the most number of times you will have to cook in any month will be seven, if as Rachael Ray suggests, you cook for 4 and live off leftovers.
Now lets say it does take you 30 minutes to cook each of those four portion meals. I make that, that in the space of a month, you will have spent just 3 1/2 hours cooking, plus just a couple of minutes on the other days to heat the second and subsequent portions.
Someone who cooks these same meals on a daily basis, will have spent at least 14 hours per month cooking. A bit of organization saves at least 10 hours - that you can spend doing something you enjoy, or that you probably didn’t have in the first place if you are the typically busy person - as well as saving energy (both yours and the cooking heat) and, likely paying lower prices for buying in larger quantities.
You also only have to think about 7 dishes and their ingredients for the purposes of menu planning. It’s definitely worth it in my mind.
Sponzurz
The only problem for me is that I usually don’t like leftovers because of texture issues. For that reason, I really like Rachael’s “double duty” recipes where she converts the same basic ingredients into an entirely new dish. Her next cookbook will have a whole bunch of those!
[…] but those are what stand out as being items around which meals can be based and, just to practice some of what I preach, what I did next was to come up with a list of 7 reasonably varied meals - with some help from food […]