- The Guardian
6 Thursday 1 August 2019
Food
Allow for real life
A meal plan should not dictate your
life. As you plan, jot down what you
are doing each day (meeting mates
for a drink after work, picking the
kids up late from football) and think
about what time you have to cook,
if at all. Working across seven days
gives you fl exibility. You can stay late
in the pub or order a takeaway on a
whim without creating disastrous
waste. “I can’t be rigid about it,” says
Turner. “Work and family life don’t
allow for that. If meals get shunted
around the week, that’s fi ne.”Find your MO
Food off ers infi nite possibilities. To
write a quick meal plan, you need to
narrow them down, establishing a
framework that works for you. You
might start by choosing three meats
a week, from a whole chicken to a
pack of bacon, then select recipes
that use those meats across two or
three meals. Or you might be led by
leftovers: select three main meals
you love, then choose recipes for the
other days that use up any raw or
cooked remants. Cooking dinner plus
a portion for tomorrow’s lunch is a
third way to minimise cost and waste.
Another idea is to stick to one type
of cuisine each week (Indian, Italian,
Chinese ), so you don’t end up having
to use leftover pak choi in a lasagne.
“If you do Thai on Tuesday and pizza
on Wednesday, you’ll have waste,”
says Rachel Beckwith, the family
editor at Good Food magazine.Embrace the internet
“Whatever I’ve got left over from
my last dish, I use as the fi rst pieceTen tips for stress-free meal-
Tired of scrabbling
for last-minute
dinner ideas or
throwing away
perishables? Here’s
how to plan your
week’s food, writes
Tony Naylor
Kim-Joy
bakes
These cookies are extremely
delicate and have a melt-in-your-
mouth texture thanks to the use of
potato starch. You can replace this
with plain fl our, but it will result in
a more ordinary shortbread. Make
the pictured fruit and veg, any
other shapes you like or just leave
them plain : either way, you won’t
regret it.
Put the butter and icing sugar in a
mixing bowl and cream together
until light and fl uff y. Add the
vanilla bean paste and mix again
until combined. Sift in the potato
starch and plain fl our, then combine
into a ball using a spatula. Avoid
overmixing.
Divide the dough among fi ve
bowls and colour using gel food dye.
You will need orange dough for the
carrots, purple for the aubergines,
red for the strawberries and yellow
for the bananas, plus green to make
stems.
Shape the fruit and veg using your
hands. The dough will be a little
sticky and tricky to handle , so dust
your hands with potato starch or
fl our to stop it sticking to you. Try
to handle the dough lightly, and the
minimum amount possible. The less
you handle it, the more the biscuits
will crumble and melt in your
mouth. Press the sesame seeds on to
the strawberries to make them look
more realistic. Use a butter knife to
mark the carrots with indentations.
Mix a little brown food dye with
water, then use a paintbrush to
“ripen” bits of the bananas.
Place the shapes on a lined baking
tray and chill for 15-30 minutes.
Meanwhile, heat the oven to
160C/140C fan/ gas mark 3.
Bake for about 12 minutes. They
will expand slightly but will hold
their shape very well. Eat them
straight away or leave to cool for a
few minutes on a wire rack.
To order Kim-Joy: Cute and Creative
Bakes to Make You Smile for £15.84
(RRP £18) go to guardianbookshop.
com or call 0330 333 6846.
Prep 20 mins
Cooking 12 mins
Chill 15-30 mins
Makes 15-20
Ingredients
For the cookies:
125g salted
butter (cubed, room
temperature)
40g icing sugar
½ tsp vanilla bean
paste
125g potato starch
80g plain fl our
To decorate:
Gel food dyes:
orange, purple, red,
yellow, green and
brown
White sesame seedsMiniature fruit and
vegetable cookies
K
ate Turner is aware
that the chalkboard
meal-planner in her
Sussex kitchen can
bewilder visitors.
“Friends come
round and go: ‘Wow, my God!’,”
says the author of My Zero-Waste
Kitchen. That wallchart (Wednesday:
porridge; Dad’s salad; pilaf;
Thursday: cereal, tuna sandwiches;
spinach pie) may look overwhelming,
but Turner insists: “It’s not scary.
Not having to think about what
you’re cooking is liberating. It saves
money, time and stress.”
Meal-planning has a way to go
before it becomes mainstream, but it
has long been a hit with weight-loss
experts and wellness gurus, and the
growing desire to cut food waste has
led to a new wave of interest.
But where do you start? Here are
10 tips from experts.Write it down
Whether you use a Google doc,
a spreadsheet, a fridge whiteboard
or a simple notepad, you fi rst need
to setup a seven-day planner that
you can easily edit. If you prefer,
there are apps (Yummly, SideChef,
Smart Recipes) that can help you
pick meals and recipes and generate
shopping lists.
Make it enjoyable, urges the chef
Miguel Barclay, the author of One
Pound Meals : “You don’t have to
start on Monday. Start on Friday
night’s curry if that’s the meal you
look forward to most, or Sunday
roast if that’s non-negotiable. If
cooking’s not exciting, in six months
you’ll be back on takeaways.”of the jigsaw for my next recipe,”
says Barclay, a pro chef with a vast
mental Rolodex of ideas to draw
on. But where should the rest of us
look for inspiration? “Type ‘leftover
chicken recipes’ into Google,”
he suggests. “There’s the 10 best
leftover chicken recipes, pictures,
everything. There is no secret to
fi nding recipes: just type it into
Google, pick one, move on. ”Build a staples cupboard
It needn’t be huge, but put together
a store cupboard of basic carbs (dried
pasta, lentils, rice); fl avourings (soy
sauce, stock cubes, dry herbs, spices);
tins (pulses, tomatoes, tuna); and
frozen veg, such as peas. You will be
ready to tackle most planned meals.Check your fridge before you shop
According to Love Food Hate Waste,
30% of people don’t; almost half
of us forget to check the freezer;
and 44% of 18 to 34-year-olds go
shopping without making a list.
Browsing online can be helpful by
showing you pack sizes as you write
your meal plan, but deliveries can
often include short-dated products
or already ripe fruit that you need
to speed-eat, disrupting that plan.
Instead, shop in person, ideally
somewhere you can weigh out the
ingredients you need. Write your
shopping list in a rough date order
as a reminder to buy items with a
longer sell-by date that you plan to
use later in the week.Buy big, versatile fl avours
“Chorizo and bacon are perfect
examples,” says Barclay. “A littlellifРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS