I’ve set myself a challenge once a week of doing a grocery shop and not putting away most of the ingredients but instead turning them into a few nutritious basics I can use through the week to save me time. Meal prep for me is not about throwing away my weekends to batch cooking, or even planning out with great rigidity my week. Meal prep is about getting some key items mostly ready to go in the fridge so I have a 5 minute turnaround for dinner in the evening. I want to spend more time with my kids. I want to sit down and play with them after preschool/ nursery/ a day at the park, and not be tied to the kitchen.

So, here’s a pretty detailed rundown of how to meal prep something simple, and in a way that’s not boring or time consuming, but that sets you up for tonight’s dinner, even tomorrow’s, plus another lunch or two. I had a half Jap pumpkin that I peeled as I had my second coffee of the day - before the official day starts right? - and with only 10 mins to spare I cut it into large pieces (it doesn’t matter how big as long as they’re about the same size). I sautéed a roughly chopped onion in a largish pot (I think it’s about a 23cm cast iron casserole with a lid) with extra virgin olive oil, letting it turn transparent while I popped into the next room and put on a load of washing. I added a garlic clove, some ground turmeric, two large dried shitake mushrooms (STAY WITH ME … you don’t need to do this. And I had them in the pantry and they’ve been there a couple of months so I was determined to finally use them. I am not a million per cent sure they made any difference to the end result, maybe the flavour is a little deeper, the colour is a little darker, and maybe there’s a slight savoury umami about the soup). If you have them, add a couple (they get removed soon) and see what you think. I grated a small knob of turmeric here as well, because I had it, but you could use ginger here as well/ instead.

I would normally swear to you that you should add homemade chicken or vegetable stock at this point, but today I am not, because that would be hypocritical. I realised soon after cutting up my pumpkin that I had no homemade stock in the freezer and I was going to die on this hill of making the soup in my spare moments. So I used this, or I sometimes use this one. I kind of love these stocks - I prefer them to the liquid stocks in plastic you can get from the supermarket (by all means use your store-bought “homemade” stock). The powdered ones don’t have that immense salty artificial taste, so you can actually taste your food above the stock, which I prefer. I don’t really get going to all the effort of making your own soup and then adding those over-herbed stocks that overpower everything. I tore up 1/4 loaf of bread into chunky croutons and sliced the rest for the freezer.

Anyway, it all simmered there with 6 cups of water and 3 or 4 tablespoons of my stock powder, until the pumpkin was super soft - I checked my emails, then I turned off the heat.

I didn’t have time to do anything else. That was it, time up.

When dinner came, I blended the soup and popped the torn up bread on a baking tray, drizzled with olive oil and soooo much grated Parmesan on top (I use this grater for Parmesan) and grilled in oven until golden (while I poured the soup into bowls for the kids). I store the non-blended soup in the fridge for the day, then return the blended soup to the same saucepan for heating, to save washing up.

I ate our 5 minute dinner with the kids and a glass of wine - my two year old insisted on spoonful after spoonful of sour cream on hers while my five year old would only take spoonfuls of soup when I did (he’s obsessed with the joke of copying me and my partner but adding the word “fart” sometimes. So that is nice for us ;) ). That was that. Actual dinner took 5, maybe 8, minutes. And there’s a litre of soup leftover for my lunch tomorrow, and the kids’ dinners in two nights,or I can freeze the rest. Meal prep win.

I actually think you could have cooked that soup in the time it took for you to read this post ;) xx Kate