Video:How to Cook Meals in Advance

Transcript:How to Cook Meals in Advance

Hi, I’m Chef Mark Tafoya from Remarkable Palate Personal Chef Service in New York City and I’m here for About.com. Today, I’m going to give you a few tips for preparing foods in advance so you have food to eat all week.

Plan Meals Ahead

It’s really easy if you think ahead and you plan ahead to cook many dishes for the entire week. You’re going to want to maybe double or even triple a recipe. And you can freeze things and maybe portion them up into smaller portions and put them in the freezer and enjoy them maybe even a month down the line.

Under Cook Food For Re-Heating

When you’re cooking many dishes in advance and you’re wanting to have them come out perfect when you reheat them, the trick is to under cook the food. We’ve all had the experience where we’ve then had leftovers. We put it in a container, through it in the freezer, took it out later and it was horrible.

If you know that you’re going to be cooking food in advance to reheat later you’re going to want to take it off just before it’s done, cool it very quickly, properly store it, and label it so you know what it is. And when it went out, when it was cooked, when you reheat it, if you’re cooking in the microwave, you definitely only want to reheat at maximum fifty percent power. Let it take a little longer to heat up and you won’t over cook your food.

Storing and Re-Heating Chicken

Chicken in particular is a really difficult thing to reheat. You really want to just under cook it. You want to make sure that the outside has a nice color, that it’s well cooked, but the inside is maybe still a little bit pink. You’re going to take it off and cool it as quickly as possible and really the key is making sure it’s protected with a sauce. You want to completely cover it once it’s cooled and then you want to freeze it.

Storing and Re-Heating Meatloaf

Meatloaf is a very freezer friendly food. You’ve got the egg in the there and you’ve got some bread crumbs and milk and so it’s very moist. And so you want to take it out after it’s cooked. Of course something like meatloaf has to be completely cooked through. You want to cool it completely, slice it into slices, and then wrap those individual slices or maybe two slices per serving in tin foil, then put those into a freezer bag then label it. You can take out individual foil packets, defrost those in the fridge for a day, and then you’ll be able to reheat it when you want just your one serving.

Defrost Food in Refrigerator

When you’re doing food in the freezer and you know you’re going to have a lot of it, the key is to defrost in the refrigerator. You might want to take it out the night before, put it in the refrigerator, and let it defrost slowly, over time. You want a slow even defrosting of all your food and the refrigerator is the best environment for that.

Storing and Reheating Grains

Grains are really freezer friendly and they’re a really great thing to cook in advance and you’ll always have some great side dishes. Wild rice, things like this, that are actually higher in fiber. You can do them in a pilaf, you can throw in some herbs. Once they’re cooled down you can package them and put them in the freezer.

In the late summer and fall you’ve got a lot of Kales. These leafy greens that are really high in iron and they’re really good for you and then mix them in with the cooled grains and then once that cools all the way down, again, you can freeze it. And it reheats really wonderfully.

The Room Temperature Danger Zone

It’s that room temperature, which we call the room temperature danger zone, which we have to watch out for. You don’t want food to be in that temperature danger zone for more than two hours. You want to bring it through that temperature danger zone as quickly as possible and then it can be in the refrigerator or freezer and it’ll be really safe.

You can use an ice bath, cold water with ice and you’d set a smaller bowl just inside that bowl and stir and it would quickly cool something down. So if you spread something over a large surface area you can cool it very quickly.

Cook With Friends and Neighbors

I said you should cook food in bulk, well, obviously, you can get a little tired of that. So, you might want to find a friend, a neighbor, a relative, that’s also interested in this, have them cook a few dishes and then you can trade off and that way you get a little variety without having to cook all of the food yourself.

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