How often do you cook the same meal?

[TheBear]

Hardly ever - I try to cook produce that is in season, so that means that the available set of ingredients changes on a regular basis.

The whole food approach that we are using really helps ensuring that your diet is varied as you have to get inventive to use all the different bits of the animal or vegetable.
As an example...if we get some prawns, then I'll make a sauce or stock with the shells and heads (they have all the flavour), the sauce will require some seasonal veggie, and will probably be served with some sort of fish - at the moment that's fennel but will only use a little bit of the fennel bulb - so now I've got fennel to make into something, last night it was fennel, pumpkin and chicken risotto - the risotto needed a stock, so I bought a whole chook, made a stock with the bones, added the breasts to the risotto...but now I've got the legs and some left over stock, so I'm making cauliflower soup for lunch and have to decide what to do with the legs for dinner.

It takes a bit of time to get your head around doing your meal planning as a flow like this instead of thinking about individual meals - but it's a lot more efficient, and saves a lot of money as you waste much less.

There are a few recipes that appear regularly, but even those don't tend to crop up more than once a month - I keep an eye on the cookery channel, look at restaurant reviews, menus, magazine articles and then see if I can find a matching recipes on the internet when something catches my eye.

[Aimz]

TheBear - you are one super husband!! Can you teach my DH some tricks? hehe

[Tracey]

I try to always cook something different & OFTEN try to make someth8ng that will do 2 nights or so..


Like roast we will have with everything, but next night it might be the Roast meat with fried rice & steamed greens, then the next night might be pasta & the following will be left over pasta in baked potatoes or pies or something... So it's leftovers but a bit different, I try to not cook same thing within 3-4 wks!!!

[Lisa]

I try to avoid making the same thing twice in 1 month.
My brother and his GF come over here every Wednesday night for dinner, and have been dong so since the end of Jan, and they have never had the same thing twice since coming here, which is great for them as they are Uni students and don't get much of a chance to try different things very often, so they try them at my house

[catherinemoses]

We have our favourites, and I probably cook some repeat meals about twice a month.
I like to use Continental meal flavour bases. Stroganoff, Apricot chicken, pork in plum sauce, greek pita pockets etc. They are quick and easy, tho I don't always follow them exactly. I add extra vegies to bulk it out a bit. I try and make sure every meal makes at least 4 serves. I try things that I wouldn't normally try and if I don't like them I don't buy them again! Jar sauces are great too. Add meat and vege and pasta or rice. use different kinds of pasta...try gnocchi or raviolli etc to add variety.
HTH

[New Dawn]

As I cant cook my poor family has to eat the same thing every FN... wish I could cook I have just brought myself the recipes + mag which has some great ideas so this FN I hope I can pull my finger out and make something different... Doesnt help I really HATE food its so dull....

[Willow]

We definitely have weekly favourites but we go through phases, at the moment we're in slow cooker phase so lots of soups, stews, casseroles etc. Things like spag bol or meat and veg we have at least once a week or once a fortnight.

For ages we were in stir fry phase but we're over that now and haven't had one for ages. Lately I've been doing potato bake and a roast once a fortnight too.

[Janie]

Oh Tali I almost wish I had your problem!!! I love food too much, as does my DH, so we spend too much time thinking about it, planning it, cooking it and eating it LOL. We get so much enjoyment out of food. Well DH loves the planning and eating parts, I love all of it, particularly reading about it, cooking it and eating it!

And I wonder why I can't lose that 8 kgs!!!!!!

Depends on the season, there are some old favourites that get pulled out every fortnight or so, others we go for awhile without. Bear, I wish I had the time to cook and eat like you do, I think it's a wonderful way to live, so does DH!

[Laranna]

We rotate our meals weekly and after reading this thread I feel slack for not doing new recipes! LOL

We do spag bol, lamb casserole, beef stir fry, roast chicken pieces with veg, and DP makes a yummy pasta and also a lamb steaks with a balsamic sauce and mashed sweet potato...sometimes I'll do a tuna bake or a curry...been avoiding curries while breastfeeding as they don't go down too well with bubs, which is a bummer cause I love curries. Most of our meals we aim to have leftovers for lunch the next day.

Once DS starts going longer between feeds and having longer sleeps I hope to start making some new yummy meals as I love cooking when I have lots of time

[Sair]

If it was up to DP it would be the same every night, some store bought chicken stuffed with ham and cheese (the name escapes me for the moment) packet pasta (usually alfredo) and peas, carrots and corn (frozen of course).

I on the other hand prefer some variety but I have my favorites. We tend to go over the same menu every month but sometimes those favorites will pop up twice in that month. Hope that made sense

[TheBear]

Bear, I wish I had the time to cook and eat like you do, I think it's a wonderful way to live, so does DH!

It really doesn't have to be a terribly time consuming thing if you don't want it to be, there are lots of little tricks that you can use to minimise the time spent in the kitchen.

If you get a chance, watch how professional chef's work - they will prepare a load of little bins "mis en place" full of all the raw and/or semi-prepared things that they use on a regular basis - from this they can often produce 20-30 different dishes in a few minutes. They are also very good at keeping multiple things going at once - it's no good standing at the stove doing one thing, you may as well have two or three pots going to make better use of your time.

The same techniques can be applied at home - I use a lot of little zip lock bags and vacuum seal bags to allow things to be done in stages, so I can reach into the fridge and grab bags of chopped, prepared veggies, sauces, etc to assemble a dish quickly. If I'm in the kitchen waiting for the toaster, the kettle to boil, or usually cause I've run the hot water for the washing up too hot and I can't put my hands into it - then I'll spend the time chopping or peeling something ready for the next meal, then bag it and put it away until I need it. As an example - many of sauces that I make start with frying onion, celery and carrot so it's always worth making sure that I've got little bags of pre-chopped ready to go into the pan.

The biggest time saver is a good knife and knife skills - practice chopping and cutting things properly concentrate on speed and accuracy and everything else gets faster.

One of my favourite cook books is Nigel Slater's "Appetite" - it's full of very simple, quick basic recipes that encourage variation - for example, one of the recipes is for a pan-fried veal escallope, it then has about 20 variations to serve it with oranges, parsley, garlic, oranges, nuts, basil, etc...it's great because once you have the basic techniques down you are encouraged to broaden your repertoire.

Most packets and jars are massive rip-off for what you are actually getting - especially when they are for classic italian dishes. There is a saying that "French food demonstrates the genius of the chef, Italian food demonstrates the genius of God!" - good italian food is about the simplest form of cooking on the planet, the key thing is getting the ingredient from field to plate with minimal interference. I have a friend that used to buy jars of carbonara sauce to cook a couple of times a week, and was shocked to discover that if you make the sauce fresh then all it contains is eggs, cream, parmesan and optionally ham...and you don't even need to cook it as it is cooked by the heat of the hot pasta. Effectively she was paying $8 per liter for a cream and egg solution in a jar! The directions on the pre-made sauce actually took longer than making it from scratch.

This may be wandering outside the scope of this topic....would it be helpful if I can provide simple recipes to replace the cans, jars and bottled sauces that you commonly use?

[Caz1971]

We have our favourites, and I probably cook some repeat meals about twice a month.
I like to use Continental meal flavour bases. Stroganoff, Apricot chicken, pork in plum sauce, greek pita pockets etc. They are quick and easy, tho I don't always follow them exactly. I add extra vegies to bulk it out a bit. I try and make sure every meal makes at least 4 serves. I try things that I wouldn't normally try and if I don't like them I don't buy them again! Jar sauces are great too. Add meat and vege and pasta or rice. use different kinds of pasta...try gnocchi or raviolli etc to add variety.
HTH

Yes I have started to use those Maggi flavour bases... Love the beef stroganoff. Want to try it with beef mince.

I also do spagetti bolagnaise every few weeks, its easy and goes a long way.

[Kazbah]

DH doesn't like change - prior to meeting me, he'd rotate between chicken kiev with potato gems & snags with potato gems.

Now we have roast on Sunday, kiev on Tuesday, snags on Wednesday, lamb backstrap on Thursday and friday is takeout, and Saturday could be anything. Of course if we're having problems with Pip, its all out the window.