Have a glut of produce? There’s a batch for that

Gardeners know this scenario all too well: one day you are admiring the massive quantities of vegetables ripening on the vine, and the next day you are cursing the massive quantities of vegetables ripening on the vine. The best way to deal with this abundance? Make items in large batches that you can freeze or preserve. The Guardian offers a handful of batch cooking ideas from chefs and food writers that will help you deal with a large amount of produce.

These batch ideas aren’t just for gardeners. They can also help you take advantage of sales or bail you out when you overbuy. The Big batch caramelized onions pictured above make that huge Costco bag of onions make more sense for a family of two. Batch cooking can make sense in the short term as well. In the Guardian article, Chetna Makan offers an example of roasting a large amount of cauliflower at once and then using the precooked cauliflower in curries, pasta dishes, or salads throughout the week, shortening meal prep time.

One thing I dread when trying to batch things like a big stash of tomatoes is the prep work. I used to core, carefully cut an “x” in the bottom of each tomato, blanch, then plunge into ice water so I could slip off the skins. That’s a lot of work and I often put off doing it for so long that some tomatoes rotted. Searching for shortcuts solved this problem and I found not one, but two ways to speed things up. The first was to just freeze the tomatoes whole: when they thaw, the skins are fairly easy to remove. That was the quickest option, but I prefer to do a bit more work upfront so when the cooking urge strikes I don’t have to spend a lot of time prepping. The second option was to cut off a small slice on the stem end of the tomatoes, stand them upside-down on a baking sheet, and run them under the broiler for a few minutes. This is much easier than the blanch/shock/peel method. A few minutes spent searching YouTube, Instagram or your favorite social media account will likely reward you will an abundance of shortcut batch ideas to go along with your glut of produce. Do you have any batch cook/prep timesavers?