Preparation is the key to an easy life

Inspired by Caroline’s post on Early Birds and Night Owls, I had a look at my own habits and patterns and confirmed to myself that I really am an early bird. By 3pm my energy levels have vanished to a point beyond rescue and by 6pm, I can’t construct a sentence that doesn’t involve food. The last thing I want in the early evening is to be faced with a mountainous pile of laundry to be folded or an hour or so preparing ingredients for a recipe that should take less than 20 minutes to cook.

The only answer is to sneakily beat my own laziness by working smarter, rather than harder and wearing myself out even more. My sneaky answer to that is Prep Day. I arrange my grocery shop to coincide with my day off and spend the entire day preparing food so that when I want to cook during the month, a lot of the painful preparation is already done for me.

First comes the garlic. I grab a couple of heads of garlic, peel and mince it before popping it in a clean jar and add in some olive oil. Whenever I need garlic in a recipe (and I do use a lot of it), I just grab a spoonful from my jar and hey presto, ready to rock and roll.

The second thing I use a lot of in my cooking is onions. They’re a great base, and a staple ingredient but I can tell you for a fact that wielding a sharp vegetable knife at an onion in the evening after a long day is not a good idea, especially when you’re rather clumsy and prone to chopping off the ends of your fingers. A painful affair, I can tell you! So, I start finely chopping as many onions as I have in my posession and sweat them all off in a teaspoon of oil so that they are nice and soft and brown. Once they are cool, I put a couple of heaped teaspoons of chopped onion in little cellophane wrappers and freeze them, ready to chuck straight in the pan whenever I need them. No mess, no fuss, no watery eyes.

A hellish thing to deal with when you’re a woman (or indeed a fella) living on your own is that things come packaged for two eople or for three but rarely for one (unless you pay extra for the privilege) and frankly I hate to waste food. So food is split into single person sized portions. So the next time I want to oven bake some chicken pieces, I don’t have to oven bake the entire bag of chicken but I can take out a single one and leave all the others until it’s time for them to be cooked and eaten.

Something else I use a lot of is a bolognaise sauce. It’s good for spaghetti, lasagne and can easily be adapted to work with meals such as cottage pie. So I’ll knock up some of that and put it in sealable bags or containers, ready to use at a moment’s convenience. Yes, I’ll grant you that Dolmio and Ragu and heaven knows how many other manufacturers already sell ready made bolognaise sauce but when I prepare my own, I know what goes into it, and once I’ve costed up the ingredients, it’s a damned side cheaper than a jar of sauce (especially if you grow your own tomatoes)

It may not seem like much, but at the end of the day, every minute I save by spending a nice relaxed prep day in the kitchen, is a minute I can spend in front of the fire with a good book. I think that’s where I’ll be heading off to now…