Copycat Recipes to Batch Cook on a Sunday

Everything in this collection freezes without losing anything, which is a narrower list than people expect - the batch cooking guide covers why emulsions and fresh vegetables do not make the cut.

The session, in the order that keeps the oven and the hob busy:

1. Chili first, doubled. Brown the patties, build the pot, and then it simmers unattended for nearly two hours while you do everything else. Sixteen portions.
2. Pizza dough, doubled. Fifteen minutes of work, then it goes in the fridge. Eight bases.
3. Seasoned beef, doubled. Twenty minutes. The base of ten more meals.
4. Crunchwraps from some of that beef - folded, wrapped in foil, frozen unfried. Eight.
5. Breakfast muffins, assembled and wrapped. Eight.

About three hours, most of it waiting. Around £25 of ingredients. Roughly twenty meals in the freezer, portioned flat in labelled bags.

The freezer set-up that makes this work - flat bags, portioning, labelling - is in setting a kitchen up for batch cooking, and it matters more than the cooking does.