Cook Once, Eat Twice

It’s Sunday afternoon. Sam is making a big pot of bean chilli with rice: dinner tonight for two, then lunches on Monday and Wednesday. In the shopping bag are two onions, a punnet of mushrooms, two 400 g tins of kidney beans, two 400 g tins of chopped tomatoes, a bag of frozen peppers, chilli powder, cumin and rice. When you plan a shop like this, count the packs you have to buy, not just what the recipe uses; Plan Affordable, Varied Meals shows how.

The beans are tinned, so they’re already cooked. Dried red kidney beans would need the hard boil from Low and Slow first. Cooking the chilli is the easy part. The skill is in what happens to the leftovers after dinner: a big pot cools from its surfaces inward, just as it heated, so its middle stays warm the longest.