Can batch cooking help cut your shopping bills?
- Published
Suzanne Mulholland says batch cooking can deliver significant savings on shopping costs
When Suzanne Mulholland turned her time management skills to the kitchen she was surely ahead of the curve.
From her home in the Scottish Borders, the Batch Lady - as she has become known - has gathered hundreds of thousands of social media followers.
It started out with her own efforts to spend more time with her children and less time cooking.
However, her methods could also have been designed with the current cost of living crisis in mind.
She believes they will "automatically" reduce the amount people spend on food.
Originally from Livingston, the 47-year-old moved to the Ettrick Valley in the Borders with her husband and started using the skills she had learned in her career to help bring up their two children.
"I was a time management specialist so I used to teach people in big multinational organisations how to manage their time well to be the most efficient that they could be," she said.
"When I stopped working and had kids I actually thought you know, there seems to be no set up like that for busy working mums - it also needs home life sorted in a similar sort of way."
That was when she started her batch cooking and freezing which quickly caught on.
The recipes are all designed to be frozen and eaten at a later date
"Basically lots of people asked me what I was doing and how I managed to make so many meals in such a short space of time," she said.
"I showed a bunch of mums the cooking side of the Batch Lady and somebody said put it on YouTube.
"That was four years ago and now we are four books in and it just seems to have grown and grown very quickly and it's been a fantastic experience."
She offers different approaches to batch cooking - one of which is simply to "double up" on meals every night - making one and freezing one.
One of The Batch Lady's cooking methods is to make 10 family meals in an hour
"How we look at it is if you're going to make a recipe, it actually takes about three minutes more to double and make one for another night," she said.
"You've got everything out - you've got all the pots and pans out, so actually three minutes of extra cooking and you've given yourself a whole night off in the future."
There is another more radical option - making 10 meals in an hour at the weekend.
"That's giving you 10 meals for your future - so 10 meals in the freezer gives you 10 nights off cooking," she said.
"I think a lot of people would rather cook like that and spend an hour in their pyjamas on a Sunday, than every night having to cook from scratch."
Suzanne says the batch cooking also helps to reduce on food waste
As well as saving time, Suzanne says she wanted to feel good about the food she was giving her children - now aged 14 and 16 - rather than reaching for a ready meal.
Her latest book The Batch Lady: Cooking on a Budget has just come out and looks more closely at the cost-cutting potential of her methods by using cheaper ingredients too.
"Time is the thing that always sort of interests me in life - how to save time - but actually, as a consequence, you automatically save money," she said.
It is an unashamedly old-fashioned approach of writing a shopping list and sticking to it.
She said that avoids the temptation to "throw everything in your trolley and hope that you've got a meal when you get to the checkout".
It was friends who first suggested she share her methods via YouTube
"I think you could drop 50% off the cost of your shopping," she said.
"It's not just about what you buy, it's about how you store that stuff once you buy it.
"If you can buy lots of frozen fruit and vegetables then it's going to last for weeks and weeks and you're not throwing it in the bin and buying it again at the end of the week."
She said people could save a "huge amount" by "stopping shopping how supermarkets want us to shop".
And, Suzanne added, no special gadget is needed.
Suzanne started her batch cooking in order to spend more time with her family
"Because I write cookery books on freezer food, I obviously have massive giant freezers out in one of my barns," she said.
"But actually I do show throughout all my social media how you only need a three-drawer freezer.
"Everything that we freeze on the Batch Lady is frozen flat in bags, in food bags, so they actually freeze like library books.
"So you can get about 15 meals for a family of four in one freezer drawer."
Then she recommends setting an alarm for 18:00 every day to remember to get the following day's meal out to defrost.
"It's two minutes to bend down and take something out and you feel amazing knowing that the next day's dinner is sorted," she said.
In the process, you might also find you have saved a few pence.