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Image / Living / Food & Drink

The benefits of batch cooking, from more time to more money


By IMAGE
16th Feb 2024
The benefits of batch cooking, from more time to more money

Want to ensure you maintain your healthy eating goals throughout the year for you and your family? Susan Jane White says batch cooking is the answer. Here are six tips on the benefits of batch cooking to convince you of its powers. 

“As a time-pinched, financially-puckered mum, I suddenly found myself in a rather messy situation where my kitchen management needed drastic re-evaluation. Sometimes I got it right, but most evenings I felt like a wine gum in a combine harvester.

“Being short on time, money and patience, I had a problem. I wanted to cook badass nourishing meals, but I didn’t want to cook every single night. I wanted to reduce the honking stress at 6pm in our home. I wanted to spend less time in the grocery store queuing and more time at home, high-fiving my genius. I didn’t need another freaking meditation app. What I needed was to get through the month without maxing out my Visa card or adrenal glands.

“That’s when I started batch cooking.”

Here are six benefits to convince you to get batch cooking. 

1. Batch cooking enables more free time to straddle Netflix, use your yoga membership pass, or hang out with friends and family.

2. Supporting your 2024 health and wellness goals, batch cooking will ensure you have healthy meals sitting in your freezer so you won’t be tempted to spend your hard-earned cash on cheap junk food or take-outs.

3. Less time is spent in the kitchen by removing the stress of deciding what to eat for dinner and breakfast.

4. No one likes shopping and queuing more than is absolutely necessary. Batch cooking drastically reduces the need for both.

5. Obliterating hanger (anger you feel when hungry) by providing swags of ever-ready snacks straight from the freezer such as halva, chocolate mint freezer slices or salted caramels eaten straight from frozen.

6. It’ll leave you feeling like a delicious cross between Mary Poppins and Marie Kondo.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOANNE MURPHY, FROM CLEVER BATCH BY SUSAN JANE WHITE (GILL BOOKS).

This article originally appeared in the Volume 1 (January/February) 2020 issue of IMAGE Magazine.