Cooking ahead for the week

✅ The essentials

Cooking ahead does not mean spending your Sunday in the kitchen. It means cooking once to eat twice: doubling a sauce, cooking a kilo of rice instead of 400 g, cutting tomorrow's vegetables while today's are cooking. Three moves, and weeknight evenings go from forty minutes to fifteen.

📏 The landmarks

• Sauces and stews, bolognese, tomato sauce, curry, meatballs: four days in the fridge, three months in the freezer. Often better the next day.
• Cooked rice and pasta: three days in the fridge, with a drizzle of oil so they do not stick. Rice, in the fridge within the hour.
• Raw vegetables washed and cut: two to three days in a container, except avocado and potato, which turn brown.
• Roasted vegetables and soup: four days, and they go into a quiche, an omelette, a salad.
• Meat in its marinade: up to twenty-four hours in the fridge, and it will only be better for it.
• Crêpe batter: one day in the fridge. Quiche and yogurt cake: they are eaten cold or warm, the next day without any problem.
• A gratin assembled but not baked: it waits a day in the fridge, and goes in the oven the next day, with ten more minutes.

⏱️ How long it takes

Nothing more on the day: it is the same pot, bigger. Ten minutes to cut tomorrow's vegetables while it simmers.

🩹 If it goes wrong

You made too much and will not eat it in time: the freezer, the same evening, in portions. Tuesday's rice is dry on Thursday: a spoon of water, lid on, three minutes. You do not feel like eating the same thing twice: the same sauce on pasta on Monday and in a gratin on Thursday is not the same dish.

🍽️ Make it tonight

The grandma-style bolognese sauce, with a kilo of meat instead of 500 g. Tonight pasta, Thursday quick lasagne or a gratin, and two containers in the freezer.