What kind of cook are you?
Do you like to cook all weekend just to stock your freezer? Do you
like to prep Tuesday night’s dinner on Monday night? Will you follow a
precise shopping and prep plan that yields three great weeknight dinners
with a minimum of fuss? Or would you rather do a little prep in the
early morning, turn on your slow cooker, and have dinner waiting for you
when you hit the door? While most make-ahead cookbooks focus entirely
on stocking your freezer with complete meals or meal components, this
book takes a new approach. Yes, you will find a chapter devoted to
dinners from the freezer, but you will also find seven other creative
chapters that show you how a little advance work can reap huge benefits.
Here’s a rundown of how we’ve set up the book so you can choose your
style of make-ahead cooking depending on your temperament, your
schedule, and your family’s needs. You pick the lane. We’ve done all the
planning for you, leaving nothing to chance.
1. Prep Ahead: Ready-to-Cook Meals
Oven-ready entrées that take a minimal amount of work the night
before mean a great meal with little effort the next day. With these
recipes, you can prep for tomorrow’s meal while tonight’s supper cooks
or spend 20 minutes getting dinner ready in the morning, then pop it
straight into the oven after work. We include a wide range of recipes,
from grilled beef kebabs to tandoori chicken to vegetarian stuffed acorn
squash. And we found smart ways to take advantage of the hands-off
resting time—marinades and spice rubs infuse many of the dishes with
great flavor as they sit. We also use the built-in rest to salt or
air-dry larger cuts of meat for more tender, flavorful results.
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Prep Ahead recipes
2. Reheat and Eat: Make-Ahead Stews and Braises
Stews and braises are some of the most time-intensive dishes to make
because they require long, gentle cooking to tenderize tough cuts of
meat and develop deeply flavored broths and sauces. But making these
dishes ahead of time allows you to take advantage of the time the dish
spends cooling and resting until you’re ready to reheat it. We put this
time to work, using carryover cooking during the cooling process so that
we could cut back on the active cooking time. We also used the
overnight resting time to develop complex flavor so we could simplify
our ingredient lists, saving time and effort.
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Reheat and Eat recipes
3. Bake and Serve: Oven-Ready Casseroles
Casseroles are surefire crowd-pleasers, but between preparing the
ingredients, assembling, and baking, they can be difficult to pull off
on a busy weeknight. And storing and reheating usually results in
dried-out sauces, mushy vegetables and noodles, and tough, dry meat. To
make versions of all of our favorite casseroles—from chicken pot pie to
classic lasagna—that could be made ahead, we had to reengineer our
recipes. Parcooking pasta and vegetables so they’d turn tender as the
casserole baked and making loose sauces that wouldn’t overthicken in the
oven were a couple of the tricks we used to keep our casseroles tasting
just as good as traditional versions. And we also include fresh new
classics that focus on whole grains and hearty vegetables, such as
Hearty Vegetable and Orzo Casserole and Farro, White Bean, and Broccoli
Rabe Gratin.
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Bake and Serve recipes
4. From Fridge to Table: Ready-to-Serve Entrées
Whether you’re in the mood for a healthy dinner, need something easy
to bring to a potluck or picnic, or just want to avoid cranking up the
oven on a hot summer night, dinners ready to serve straight from the
fridge are great options to save time and energy. And you’d be surprised
at the range of food that tastes great served cold—this chapter
includes fried chicken, poached salmon, and chilled Asian noodle dishes
along with a wide variety of fresh, inventive salads. Because cold dulls
flavors, we made sure to season these dishes aggressively, to make bold
dressings, and to finish the dishes with a little vinegar or lemon
juice to ensure that the flavors were bright.
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From Fridge to Table recipes
5. Shop Smart: One Grocery Bag Makes Three Dinners
It’s the eternal question: What’s for dinner tonight? This chapter
has the answer, with easy, thrifty plans that deliver three delicious
weeknight dinners. For each three-day menu, we provide you with a
shopping list of just 12 fresh ingredients plus a list of pantry staples
you’ll need. With such short ingredient lists, these menus required
that we come up with clever ways to make ingredients do double duty
while still delivering a menu with lots of variety. These easy weeknight
meals come together quickly—with impressive results.
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Shop Smart recipes
6. The Sunday Cook: Big Roasts Plus Creative Second Meals
Lazy Sundays are perfect for spending a little extra time in the
kitchen pulling off a spectacular roast for a big family meal. We wanted
to stretch that effort further by developing recipes using the
leftovers to make a quick and easy weeknight meal. We include six
roasts, each with two options for a creative meal that puts the
leftovers to work. Rosy roast beef becomes beef and vegetable fajitas or
a flavorful Vietnamese rice noodle soup, and leftover slow-roasted pork
makes easy pork fried rice or a quick pork ragu with polenta.
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The Sunday Cook recipes
7. Come Home to Dinner: Easy Slow-Cooker Favorites
The massive popularity of the slow cooker is easy to understand.
Thanks to its low, slow, and safe electric heat, many dishes can cook
all day, so you can go to work and come home to a great-tasting hot
dinner. But some slow-cooker recipes don’t live up to that promise, with
dull, washed-out flavors and mushy textures. So we looked for ways to
build great flavor, adding lots of aromatics and savory ingredients like
soy sauce and tomato paste and finishing our dishes with fresh herbs or
a squeeze of lemon juice. And we made sure to keep the prep times short
(some as quick as 15 minutes) and the cooking times long (at least
8 hours) so the recipes are easy to get started on a busy morning and
ready to eat when you come home.
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Come Home to Dinner recipes
8. Stock the Freezer: Big-Batch Suppers
There’s no better antidote to a hectic schedule than a well-stocked
freezer full of delicious, homemade, ready-to-heat meals. This chapter
includes crowd-pleasing casseroles like shepherd’s pie and macaroni and
cheese (and each recipe makes two, so you get a big payoff for your time
and effort). We also include big-batch stews, chilis, and pasta sauces
plus individual items like burritos and chicken fingers that make it
easy to feed any number of people. To ensure great results, we developed
these recipes specifically for the freezer: For creamy freezer
casseroles, we had to make the sauces looser. And to get crisp toppings
for our casseroles, we used a foil shield to separate the topping from
the moist filling.
This is from ATK:http://makeaheadbook.com/recipes/
