Hi Ray here again,
A couple of weekends ago I had a bigger group of friends over for a meal than usual. It was a birthday celebration and in total there was eight people to be fed.
Most recipes are designed to feed four people, so what did I do?
Did I trim the size of the servings? No, that just wouldn’t work.
Did I make two different dishes? Not this time, but I’ve done that in the past.
Well?
Simple. I just doubled up the ingredients. I used two onions instead of one. I used 4 chicken breasts instead of two. I used four cloves of garlic instead of two. You get the picture. It really is that easy. The cooking times stay the same. And you also cook double the amount of rice than normal. I made the yummy Massaman chicken curry.
And is there more work cooking for eight? Yes and no. The main meal was only a case of doubling the ingredients. But because this was a birthday treat, I also made side dishes of aloo gobi and dahl and made some kulfi for dessert. Really, the sole reason that there was extra effort was because of the side dishes and dessert that I made. I also heated up some poppadoms that I had got from my favorite Indian store.
The meal was a great success and really wasn’t a huge amount of effort.
Using double the ingredients means that you need large saucepans and/or frying pans that, thankfully, I have.
I use this doubling technique for making great lunches for work. I make a big curry and rice, divide the food into plastic containers and then put the containers into the freezer. On a workday I take a curry from the freezer, defrost it when I arrive at work and then just microwave it for two minutes at lunchtime for a delicious lunch (I work at a polytechnic and the main staff room has two microwaves and lots of cutlery for anybody to use). I had purchased a batch of microwaveable containers and lids) from a local packaging store and they are just the job for freezing and then microwaving. All I have to do is remember to label the container with the contents so that I know what’s in them. I can have a delicious curry for lunch every day that costs less than a boring sandwich.
Wicked.