If you find yourself cooking meals in big batches and not eating the leftovers, try ingredient prepping instead. You buy the ingredients in bulk, you prep in bulk, and you then use these ingredients in quantities you plan on eating.
Plan your shop
Which ingredients do you use most in your meals? Do your shop, while sticking to your budget, and for each ingredient you buy – that you don’t plan on eating within a few days – prep and freeze it.
If you find most of your meals contain carrots, you can buy a big 2kg bag, and prep the whole bag to suit whichever meals you cook most. A big bolognese fan? Fill a sandwich bag full of finely diced carrots. A regular fajita eater? Buy onions and peppers in bulk, cut into thin strips, then freeze.
Ingredient prepping is a great way to ensure yellow stickered produce doesn’t go to waste. As we explained in our How to shop on a budget guide, jumping on yellow sticker finds will help you stretch your budget.
People tend not to buy fresh fruits and vegetables that they have no immediate use for; buying produce in advance tends to be more of a Christmas activity than a year round one. With a bit of forward planning, if you see something that you tend to use in any of your meals, then grab it, prep it, and freeze it in portions.
(We’ve got a guide on how to freeze different types of produce if you’re unsure.)
One important thing to remember: label, label, label. Otherwise, unless it’s an instantly recognisable item like broccoli, you’ll be playing the defrost lottery. There’s nothing worse than dumping a handful of frozen, diced red pepper into your chilli con carne only to find out the hard way it was actually scotch bonnet.
Figure out what you’re prepping for
Once you’ve created a meal plan, you’ll know what you need to buy. If you’ve got a fortnightly plan, then chances are any fresh food you buy will need to be frozen.
If you can’t work out which type your meals will need, then you can always cut the same ingredient into different shapes and sizes to maximise the types of meals you’ll be able to prepare.
But again, remember to label your bags and containers. You might also find adding the date to the label helpful… particularly if you’re concerned about food safety.
At this stage, you can decide whether you’re freezing food raw, or if you want to cook and season for specific meals.
As above, if you’re a fajita lover then seasoning chicken and cutting it into strips before freezing will save you a lot of time when it comes round to making your meal. Just grab a handful from the freezer, defrost (or cook from frozen), chuck it in a pan, add your already-prepped veggies, and you’re all done. I do this with carbonara: I have a tub of finely grated pecorino and one of parmesan in the freezer. There are always eggs in the fridge and pasta in the cupboard so I can go from turning the stove on to eating in around 15 minutes. Bish, bash, bosh, emergency “not done a shop for a while” dinner sorted.
You can pre-cook and season protein or veggies however you wish, depending on which meals you regularly cook. This is particularly helpful for those with busy lives or those lazy days when you really just can’t be bothered. Remember to freeze cooked and raw food separately.
Defrost when you need, when you need it
The UK Gov site advises that anything you defrost should be used within 24 hours of completely thawing. Any longer and you’ll be playing food poisoning roulette. Another key piece of advice: always defrost your food in the fridge as temperatures between 8C – 63C promote bacteria growth. Obligatory, certain bacteria can still grow in cold temperatures.
Remember: you can’t refreeze raw protein if you decide you don’t need it. In this case, to prevent waste, cook it within the use-by window and then freeze it. Once you defrost it after that you can’t refreeze again.
If you’ve chosen to freeze pre-cooked food, you won’t be able to chuck it back in the freezer once thawed. Make sure you portion before freezing – or make sure you freeze it in a way you can break parts off – so that you only defrost what you need. As we’ve said many times, buying food you don’t eat is a waste of both money and groceries.
