Batch cooking when your appetite has shrunk

Cooking a full pot and freezing it in small portions means the food is there on the evenings you only want a little.

Eating · By the Appetite Journal team · 1 min read · Wednesday 23 September 2026

If you used to cook for a big appetite, the old recipes still make the old amounts. The simplest fix is to keep cooking the whole pot and change what happens after it.

Split the pot into small containers once it has stopped steaming, label them with the date, and get them into the freezer. The Food Standards Agency suggests cooling food within two hours and then freezing or refrigerating it. A 350 ml container is a sensible size for one person who isn't very hungry, and it defrosts in the fridge overnight.

What freezes well

Soups, stews, chilli and curries freeze well. Rice is better cooked fresh, or cooled quickly and eaten within a day. Pasta goes soft, so freeze the sauce on its own and boil a small handful of pasta when you want it.

Mashed potato freezes better than boiled, and a cottage pie split into foil trays before it goes in the oven gives you four small pies instead of one big one.

Keep track

Keep a short list on the freezer door of what's inside and cross things off as you use them. Eat the oldest labels first.