Cooking Day

Today I decided to catch up on some of my bulk cooking. On the menu were hard boiled eggs, beef chilli, blueberry muffins and chicken stock.

 

The hard boiled eggs were a late addition, mostly driven by me trying to find soft foods to eat after my wisdom tooth extraction yesterday. I was playing chauffeur this morning and happened to be driving past the egg farm. Not knowing how late they stay open on a Saturday, I went into the farm and what do you know, they were open! Giant tray of fresh eggs for $9.

 

 

Beef chilli is one of my bulk cook/freeze meals. It’s a cheap one to make and divides up easily. Then it can be added to pasta, put on pizza bases or eaten on its own. You would probably know by now I’m not a huge recipe person, but here’s roughly what I use to make it:

• 1 kg beef mince (this being my cheap meal, I grab the stuff that’s around $5/kilo. You can of course buy leaner meat.)
• 4 onions (depending on size)
• 3 tins diced tomatoes
• 2 tins kidney beans
• 1 tin chickpeas
• 1 tin corn
• Garlic
• Chilli

 

Sometimes I add other veggies if I have them on hand, particularly carrots.

 

 

Unfortunately my large frying pan passed on recently, so I only have a small one for now. This means I have to cook the onions and mince in batches, then add them to a stock pot for the simmering part.

 

 

 

Then I add the tinned items, do spices to taste and let it simmer until it looks like chilli. I bag it up into serving portions and freeze it. I usually use chilli as the spice but couldn’t find it for the life of me today, so this batch has hot paprika instead. Anything to give it a kick is fine by me!

 

 

I generally save any chicken carcass we buy, so when the bottom of my freezer fills up, I know it’s time to make more chicken stock. I’m really far away from a recipe for this – I generally have 3-4 carcasses, 2-3 onions and maybe some veggies.

 

Cover it, simmer for 2 hours, strain, bag. That’s as close to a recipe as I get for chicken stock. But it seems to work well enough for my tastes. I’m sure there are more things you can do to make the stock better, but stock that’s not purchased and in cubes is pretty new to me so I’m happy with this!

 

 

Last on my list were blueberry muffins. I try to follow recipes for baking, knowing it’s more important for that than general cooking, but I just don’t have the attention to detail to ever be a great baker! At least I’ve stopped randomly experimenting though, so more of my baking does turn out edible these days. Today I used this recipe. They turned out ok, but just a bit bland. There is no flavour apart from the blueberries and they were only store bought and who knows how fresh.

 

 

 

Do you bulk cook? What are your easy, go-to meals?