Part 3: Professional Cooking Strategies That Make Things Easier
Lynley Jones
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Cooking every single day is daunting. For most of us, who hold down jobs and take care of a family (and heck, make time for the occasional Netflix binge), it can be hard to find clean socks every day, much less cook and serve a complete meal. Or two. (Or three?!!)
Right there with you.
So How do they do that?
When I was a stay-at-home mom, I used to call my alter-ego Suzie Homemaker.
Suzie Homemaker was who I aspired to be, because she can do it all. She has laundry day and cleaning day. She grows all her own organic vegetables in her backyard garden. When someone pops by unexpectedly, she whips up a simple hors d’oeuvre and serves tea. She always has nutritious snacks ready for the kids, and her cookie jar is filled with cookies she made from scratch. Her house is clean, her linens are fresh, and her budget is balanced.
Suzie Homemaker is amazing. She’s off-the-charts. I don’t know how she does it all.
But I know exactly how she cooks. Because she cooks like a professional.
How the Pros Do It
In a professional kitchen, there are prep cooks and line cooks. The prep cooks show up in the morning to dice onions, mince parsley, make stock and sauces and dressings, and get all the ingredients prepped ahead for service. Then during service, the line cooks use all of those prepped elements to make the dishes in real time.
When you’re making dinner after work, you’re a line cook. You’re using what’s ready to make a hot meal to order. If the prep cooks didn’t show up for their shift, you’re in trouble, because you don’t have what you need to work the line. You’ll spend all your time in the weeds, which is not a place you want to be. Ever.
But guess what - you’re also the prep cook! So it was you who showed up earlier to dice the onions and parcook the potatoes. It might have been that morning or the night before or over the weekend, or just an hour ago, but at some point you, the prep cook, prepped whatever was needed so that you, the line cook, could quickly make and serve an amazing dinner.
How to cook Like a Pro
If your goal is to make meals on a fairly regular basis, you’re going to want to adopt some of these tricks of the trade:
1) Think like a chef
The chef is the one who decides what’s going to be on the menu, what recipe the line cooks will use to make it, and what the prep cooks need to do so things will be ready at service. She purchases the ingredients and makes the prep list for the crew to work from. She knows what’s still in the walk-in, and what they need to make more of. This is the role you’re in when you’re planning your meals ahead of time (as in either method from last week’s post).
2) Do your mise en place
Mise en place (pronounced MEEZ-on-plah-ss) is French for “things in place” and in cooking parlance, it means prepping all the ingredients you’ll need for a dish before you start cooking. If your prep cook showed up for that earlier shift, this should be really easy. If not, spend 15 minutes or so dicing and mincing, and digging things out of the back of the pantry, so you’ll be ready to cook.
When a recipe claims it will take 30 minutes to make, that time starts after the mise is complete. And having your mise ready to go makes the actual mealtime cooking faster and easier, with less cleanup.
3) Make more than you need
Turn your line-cook self into an extra prep cook by making a few more of whatever you're making, with a plan to use the rest in another dish. For example, roasted chicken thighs are in heavy rotation in my house, not only because they are delicious, but also because their meat can be an ingredient in about a zillion other dishes.
So for my family of four, I almost never only roast 4-5 chicken thighs. That would be enough for dinner tonight, but after all that trouble I would have nothing left over! As long as I’m putting chicken thighs in the oven, it’s barely any more work to roast 8-10 thighs than it is to roast 4-5 thighs. It’s literally the same sheet pan! But now I have an ingredient ready to go for another meal.
You can do the same with greens such as spinach, kale, Swiss chard and the like. If you have a large enough pan, make twice as much as you need, then refrigerate the rest. You can serve it on toast with eggs for breakfast, or toss it with pasta for dinner on another night. Rice is another example. I love to make more than we’ll eat in a single meal, because the rest can be the basis of so many other dishes, from stuffed peppers to rice bowls.
4) Try for a weekly fridge cleanout
As the chef, you’re going to want to stay on top of what’s happening in the refrigerator each week. What’s important here is not necessarily the cleaning part, but rather the ingredients part. You need to know what’s still in there from last week, what’s still good, what needs to be tossed, etc.
As I said last week, everything in your fridge needs to be labeled with the name of what’s in the container, and the date you made it. Choose the smallest container the contents will fit in to save fridge space. Most things will last 5-7 days, so knowing the date is super important. As you get near the end of that window, you can either use it up or freeze it for a future meal. Take a look at what’s in the fridge before you go shopping each week. Knowing what needs to be used right away will help you plan meals and spend less at the store.
5) Manage your team
If you’re cooking for family members or housemates, put them to work! If they’re up for it, you can leave a prep list for teenagers or your spouse to take care of a few tasks before you get home and start to cook. And they can also help to put away the extras at the end of the meal in labeled containers. (And help with the dishes of course - more about this in a future post.)
And - if they’re not up for it, or if you don’t have a team, its okay! Plan ahead to help yourself out. You’re your own team, so do what you can do. You’re brilliant and amazing! You’ve got this!!
A batch-cooking guide to get you started:
Beans are a cook’s best friend! They’re super easy to make in a big batch on the weekend, since they have very few ingredients and they cook for hours unattended. You can use them in multiple other dishes, and you can freeze them for future use.
More recipe inspo for Cooking More
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Next week: Cooking for picky (selective!) eaters
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Dried beans are a pantry staple and a cook’s best friend. Here’s how to make one big batch of pinto beans for dinner, then use the rest to make 7 other dishes. Eat now, freeze for later and transform to new meals. All good.