A Chic Paris Holiday Season – Day 10 – Investment Cooking

  December 12, 2020

Holidays and holiday food seem to enjoy a close relationship, at least in my traditions. If only my preferred holiday food enjoyed a good relationship with words like healthy, slimming, and EASY! Fiona Ferris proposes a good plan to manage holiday food in her book, A Chic and Simple Christmas.

She does several “investment” cooking meals either right before or early in the season.  She prepares a double or triple size meal (like a casserole or a meatloaf) that survives freezing and reheating deliciously. She and her husband eat their usual serving. After dinner, Fiona separates out the remainder and stores it in meal-sized containers and pops them into the freezer. Presto, she has 2 or 3 home-made meals sitting in the freezer just waiting for a busy evening. All she has to do is add a salad or a vegetable and microwave the frozen main-course. Dinner is on the table.

I first learned about “investment” cooking from one of my favorite real-life chic mentors. She encouraged me to try the idea as a way to have tasty, hot lunches at work (I had been heating instant oatmeal or toasting a bagel for my lunches.) Once I got into the habit of making a large pot of coq au vin or boeuf bourguignon every 5-6 weekends and bringing the frozen meals to work to microwave back to life along with some rice and maybe an apple for dessert, I never looked back. (It was humorous to watch my office mates linger at the office microwave, noses twitching, as I was reheating my lunch!)

My husband will make a huge pot of meaty spaghetti sauce and put most of it in meal-sized freezer ziplock bags for a quick, hot, and tasty meal for all four of us. A close friend of mine would bring us double pans of her amazing meatloaf that I could cut up and put in the freezer. Many dishes that my family likes lend themselves to this type of “think ahead” cooking approach. Soups like borscht and creamy chicken stew are also terrific make-ahead meals. I have the practice of eating broth type soups (like French Onion) quite often for dinner during the holiday season because they are tasty and are low-calorie. They act to offset some of the consequences of my holiday dessert enjoyment.

Until I re-read this particular chapter, I had not thought about “holiday make-aheads” in the way that Fiona uses it – as a way to add a feeling of calm and the actual practice of healthy eating into her holiday season! Suddenly I see how I can make my next three weeks both lower-maintenance and higher quality.  For example, tomorrow afternoon, I can make a giant pot of Keto French Onion soup and freeze a good portion of it. I already have some homemade beef bone broth in the freezer and onions in the pantry. A large chicken casserole is also an easy “investment” meal that would provide maybe 2 or 3 extra (already cooked) meals. Maybe a plan of 2 “microwave-only” meals per week of this 3 week season would add some ease into the weeks? Of course, there will be extra “holiday” cooking like Christmas cookies but those feel a lot more “fun” to me than a casserole. There will also be the “Christmas dinner” dishes that I need to plan for on the actual week leading up to Dec 25. (And, to be realistic, my fine friends at Marks & Spencer are happy to help out with some prepared meals in THEIR freezer section.)

Here in Paris, restaurants are still closed as part of the French government’s second national CoVid-19 lockdown. It is possible to get delivery meals or take-out meals but I don’t like to do either of those options. (If I’m going to spend money on “eating out” here in food-fabulous Paris, I want it to be a really delicious meal with all the trimmings such as candle lights, white tablecloths, wonderful service – and someone else to clean up.) The French government recently announced that there will be a national curfew of 8pm starting on Dec 15. All this to say, cooking all meals at my home looks like it is here to stay for a while.

Note: I have added a section to my “Master Schedule” to help with the planning of “holiday investment” cooking. My “schedule” reminded me to take happy advantage of a pretty day yesterday and enjoy the decorations and shop windows of the rue Faubourg-St-Honore.