The Lazy Gourmet’s weekly workflow

I’ve got a secret to tell you. I don’t spend hours in the kitchen. Actually, some weeks I spend a little over an hour in the kitchen a week. Yet I have all sorts of interesting meals for the week.  How you ask? I cook the way restaurants cook. In batches and prepare ahead and use a workflow plan.

In the first 15 minutes I:

• put the oven and the bbq on,
• if I need some, chuck a ½ pumpkin in to roast (every 3rd week)
• Blitz almonds into chunks for salad and store in a jar (every 2nd week)
• Make garlic paste. Store
• Slice 3 red onions, chunk another and blitz it in the food processor
• Slice a bunch of spring onions
• Butterfly 2kgs of chicken breasts so they’re even thickness and divide them into two batches.
• The first batch gets a shake of a few spices from my pantry and some garlic, spread on trays and into the oven with the sliced onions around the edges. This will be done in 20 minutes.
• The second batch gets dumped in a pot of cold water with spring onion tops a chunk of ginger, some garlic and a splash of vermouth or chinese cooking wine.

In the second 15 minutes:

• Wash my knife, get a new chopping board
• Wash and roughly chop 4 or 5 heads of broccoli, dump in my pressure cooker with garlic and salt or fish sauce. Lid on and cook for about 6 minutes once up to pressure.
• I’ll put the chicken on the stove to poach at this time too, so it’s all ready in about 10 minutes.
• Dump my 1 or 2kgs of whatever mince and spices into the food processor with the blitzed onion. Blitz until combined.
• Form mince into patties and slap it on the bbq

In the 3rd 15 minutes:

• Drain the broccoli.
• Drain the poaching chicken,
• Use the poaching liquid from the chicken in a deep tray with some fish fillets (if needed) cover with foil and pop in the oven
• Pull the roasting chicken from the oven
• Flip the burgers
• Pack as much stuff into the dishwasher as possible
• Pack everything that’s cooked into containers for the fridge and freezer
• Remove the pumpkin and allow to cool

In the last 15 minutes:

• Scoop out pumpkin flesh and pack into containers. I only tend to do pumpkin every few weeks as it adds extra time onto my prep. I might not do burgers on a pumpkin week.
• Fish the fish out of the oven and drained
• Grate 4 or 5 zucchini for omelettes and salads (I do this again mid week) and store in a container
• Turn my bbq off and move the burgers to the resting rack
• Wash and chop a few lettuces. Store in a really big salad container
• Chop some capsicum and store
• Pack burgers in a large container with baking paper between layers so I can remove 1 at a time from the freezer
• Store anything that hasn’t been stored
• Put the lids on everything that’s cooled and store.

10 minute clean-up

Because I do a different burger mix each week I have a few to choose from for snacks. There is usually extra-lean beef, chicken breast, kangaroo and if I can find some, turkey breast. In a busy week I can live of these and raw veggies.

Twice a week while I’m doing my morning cardio:

• Roast sweet potato in the oven
• Cook quinoa in the rice cooker for breakfasts

To start with you might take a little longer to get through all of this, but after a few weeks and a good plan stuck to your fridge it becomes simple. Tomorrow I’ll let you in on how my meals come together for a day. This is my ‘comp prep’ workflow. In the off-season you might see something like my baked mouse cakes show up. They’re easy enough to throw in the oven while everything else is going. Each week I try to cook enough for two weeks that way I can add something new to my freezer and keep things interesting.