You don't need a restaurant kitchen to cook in bulk, but large pots are handy.
Busy and frugal cooks often find it easier to prepare large quantities of food a few times a month than small quantities of food every day. This technique has a number of advantages, including the ability to save by purchasing food items in larger, lower-cost formats. Saving time that would otherwise be spent cooking and shopping is another important benefit. Lots of freezer space for storing meals is a prerequisite, as is the purchase of bulk ingredients.
Pasta
Pasta is a perfect candidate for cooking in bulk. Large packages can be inexpensive from numerous big-box outlets, and some wholesalers deal with informal "buying groups" of a few like-minded households. Three or four kinds of pasta, mixed-and-matched with a similar number of sauces, gives a variety of meals at low cost. Aside from actual pasta dishes, pasta is a versatile ingredient in soups and casseroles.
Long-storage Vegetables
Our forefathers filled their root cellars every fall with long-keeping vegetables such as potatoes, carrots, onions, parsnips, rutabagas and cabbage. All of these are cheap and plentiful for most of the year, their durability making them inexpensive for food vendors to warehouse. Buying any combination of these vegetables in quantity allows a pragmatic cook to make frugal soups and stews in large quantity, as well as furnishing side dishes for any number of other make-ahead meals.
Frozen Fruits and Vegetables
Frozen vegetables are often overlooked in this sort of planning, but they are a potent weapon in the bulk-cooking arsenal. Extra freezer space is the first prerequisite of bulk food preparation, so finding room for jumbo packages of frozen fruits or vegetables shouldn't be a problem. The big advantage of frozen vegetables is that they are ready-to-use, with no trimming, no further preparation, no waste, and minimal use of the cook's time. Frozen vegetables cost a little more to begin with, but the time-saving and lack of wastage make them food value.
Grains and Legumes
Grains of various kinds can be had inexpensively in bulk packaging. A 50-lb. sack of flour is a lot cheaper per pound than a 5-lb. sack of flour, and makes several weeks' bread, biscuits or gravy. Rice can be bought inexpensively at Asian markets in 50-lb. or 100-lb. sizes, and other grain products such as barley or bulghur wheat can be useful if your family likes them. Legumes such as lentils and dried beans are also excellent bulk purchases, providing an inexpensive source of low-fat, high-quality protein.
Tags: freezer space, Frozen vegetables, quantities food, sack flour