How to Cook Once and Eat for the Week (Batch Cooking 101)

"Cook once, eat for the week" is a real thing, and almost every
version of it on the internet is a lie. Nobody is cooking seven
identical chicken-and-broccoli containers and enjoying it on Friday.

Done right, batch cooking takes about three hours on Sunday and gives
you fifteen meals across the week — most of them lunches and quick
weeknight dinners, with enough variety that you are not sick of the
food by Thursday. Here is how the math works and what actually reheats.

## The time math

Add up how long you spend on weeknight cooking. For most households:

- 5 weeknight dinners at 45 minutes each (prep + cook + cleanup) = 225
minutes.
- 5 weekday lunches, even quick ones, at 15 minutes each = 75 minutes.
- Total: five hours of cooking stretched across frazzled weeknights.

Batch cooking condenses most of that into a single three-hour Sunday
block, and leaves weeknights at ten to fifteen minutes each. The total
time is roughly the same. The quality of life is very different — you
get your weeknights back.

## The 3-hour Sunday plan

The trick is parallelization. The oven, the stovetop, and the
countertop all work at once.

### Hour 1: oven and stovetop both running

- **Oven at 220 C (425 F):** roast two sheet pans of vegetables
(sweet potato, broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, onions). Olive oil,
salt, one bold spice — cumin or smoked paprika.
- **Stovetop pot #1:** start a grain. Brown rice, farro, or quinoa.
Simmer, lid on, ignore it.
- **Stovetop pot #2:** start a pot of lentils or beans. If using
canned, skip this and use the burner for something else.

### Hour 2: protein and sauce

- **Oven (still 220 C):** switch to a sheet pan of chicken thighs or a
tray of salmon. 20 to 25 minutes.
- **Stovetop:** cook one big batch of ground meat with onion, garlic,
tomato — this becomes tacos, pasta sauce, or a grain bowl base.
- **Countertop:** make two sauces. A green one (pesto, chimichurri,
or a yogurt-herb sauce) and a creamy one (tahini-lemon, or a quick
peanut sauce). These turn the same components into different meals
all week.

### Hour 3: cool, portion, label

- Cool everything for 20 minutes on the counter before it goes in the
fridge. Packing hot food into a sealed container steams it and
shortens its life.
- Portion grains, proteins, and vegetables into separate containers
rather than composed bowls. Composed bowls get boring by Wednesday.
Separate components mix and match.

End of three hours: enough components for fifteen meals.

## What reheats well

Not everything survives the fridge. Plan around what does.

### Great for reheating
- Roasted vegetables (all of them, actually)
- Braised and stewed meats
- Soups, chilis, curries, lentils
- Grains — rice, farro, quinoa
- Baked pasta, lasagna
- Frittatas and crustless quiches
- Cooked beans

### Mediocre reheats
- Grilled steak — it overcooks on the second heating. Slice cold over
a grain bowl instead.
- Pan-fried fish — loses texture. Salmon reheats better because of its
fat content.
- Stir-fries — vegetables go limp.

### Bad reheats (cook fresh)
- Leafy salads
- Crispy fried anything
- Anything with a delicate raw garnish

## Containers that actually matter

You do not need a matched set of twenty. You need:

- Six to eight glass containers with snap-on lids, 600 mL to 900 mL —
these are your "single meal" containers.
- Two larger glass or stainless containers, 2 to 3 L, for bulk items
(grains, roasted vegetables, sauce).
- A few small 200 mL containers for sauces and dressings, so they do
not soak into the rest of the meal.

Glass outlasts plastic, reheats in the microwave without staining, and
does not retain curry smell. Stainless is nice but cannot go in the
microwave — choose one or the other depending on your reheat method.

## How to avoid the Thursday slump

The reason most batch cooking fails is that meal three through five
taste exactly like meal one. Two fixes:

- **Vary the sauce, not the base.** The same grain + protein +
vegetable becomes three different meals with pesto, tahini-lemon,
and peanut-lime. Sauce is the cheapest way to buy variety.
- **Add one "fresh hit" per meal.** Chopped herbs, a squeeze of lemon,
quick-pickled red onion, crumbled feta, a fried egg. Thirty seconds
of fresh work rescues any reheated bowl.

## Plug the plan into a tool

Trying to remember which sauces cover which components is a job for
a planner, not your head. Drop the week into /meal-plan, tag recipes
with "batch-ok," and scale from 2 servings to 8 servings in /recipes
so the grocery list matches the Sunday cook. Browse /explore for
batch-friendly meals already tagged in the library.

Done right, batch cooking is not seven identical containers. It is
one Sunday afternoon, fifteen mix-and-match meals, and weeknights that
look like ten minutes of reheating instead of ninety minutes of prep.
That is the actual payoff.