Summer Time Batch Cooking

Summer Time Batch Cooking

by | Jul 22, 2019 | Farm Life, Recipes

Summer time, has become batch cooking season around here.  For anyone who is unfamiliar with the term, batch cooking is making food in large batches and preserving it (usually by freezing) for use at a later date – think soups, stews, etc.  With school starting up in August, I will be twice as busy as I have been.  When taking farm work, house work, and school time, I have no time (and probably not much energy) left for fixing full dinners during the week.  I started thinking about how to make that easier and came up with summer batch cooking.

In late May, I made a list of the dishes that 1. my family likes, 2. were easy to cook on a large scale, and 3. froze well.  (Thankfully, with 1 large stand-up freezer, and two fridge freezers, we have plenty of freezer space.)  While making this list, I also listed out the ingredients, including quantity, required so that I could buy them when they were on sale.

Here is my list (if you want any of the recipes that aren’t posted, just leave a comment or email me and I will make a post for it):

  1. Burgers (done with ground venison, ground beef, and ground bacon)
  2. Chili and Kids’ Chili (done with ground venison and ground beef)
  3. Taco Meat (done with ground venison and ground beef)
  4. Taco Soup
  5. Meatballs (done with ground venison and sausage)
  6. Meatloaves (done with ground venison and ground beef)
  7. Lasagnas
  8. Shredded Pork
  9. Chicken Stew Meat see my Chicken Stock Recipe
  10. Prepacked Raw Chicken Boneless Skinless Breasts (yes, I know that this is not technically batch cooking but they so versatile, often on sale, easy to vacuum seal in 2 meal size portions, and it takes 5 minutes to throw them in an oven safe dish with some BBQ sauce for an easy main dish)
  11. Chicken Pot Pie Filling
  12. Chicken Stock (see the above link)
  13. Tortilla Soup
  14. Beef/Venison Stew
  15. Minestrone Soup
  16. Spaghetti Sauce (finally have a good recipe!)
  17. Potato Soup
  18. Bean Soup
  19. Split Pea Soup
  20. Vegetable Soup

In June and July, I cooked. Then, I vaccuum sealed (yes even soups) using my Food Savor Game Saver (awesome product by the way – the moist food setting is great!)  I freeze things on the top shelf of my upstairs freezer on a baking sheet sow they stay flat.  Then they are easy to stack in the big freezer in the basement.

At this point, some of you may be cringing at that amount of cooking.  It really isn’t that bad and doesn’t really take much longer than fixing a full meal for dinner.  Most batch cooking sessions took around 3 hours from start to finish (including time for grinding venison and for cleaning up).  Prepping meals for freezing later usually took about 30 min, if I didn’t need to rearrange for better freezer space usage.  We also eat some of whatever I batch cooked for dinner that night, so I cut out dinner prep work for that day. Score!

I put the soups in a large stock pot after doing the morning farm work and let them simmer with an occasional stir and taste test until dinner.  For shredded pork, I either put it in the Instant Pot (for pork shoulders) or the slow cooker overnight (for pork loins).  I also double up and make recipes that use similar ingredients at the same time.  Some examples are: taco meat and taco soup, bean and split pea soups, chicken stock and tortilla soup or chicken pot pie filling, and meatloaf and meatballs.  I can’t do burgers at the same time as anything else involving ground meat, because my Kitchen Aid will overheat if I try to grind more that about 9 pounds of meat at a time.  I buy ground beef, but I have to grind the venison and bacon myself.

Well, there you go.  Happy cooking!