People who write cookbooks are usually so obsessed with food that they make elaborate dinner plans over breakfast and can’t wait to try finicky new recipes – but not The Batch Lady. “No, I don’t really like cooking,” says Suzanne Mulholland with a big laugh. “My publishers always say, ‘Don’t tell people that!’”
Admittedly Mulholland, author of a slew of hit cookbooks, does enjoy cooking on a Saturday night. “When I’ve got friends over, I’m doing a theme and we’re having supper together, I love that,” she explains. “I don’t like cooking on a mundane Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday night. It’s like, take your favourite thing you love to do, say it was yoga, and then I’m going to make you do it every single night at the same time, every single night for the rest of your life – you’re probably not going to enjoy yoga!”
But the conundrum is, we’ve all got to eat. Breakfast you can pretty much make on autopilot: toast, cereal or porridge. Lunch is likely to be a sandwich, salad or a soup, but then comes dinner, and of all the meals, that’s the one that requires the most thought, prep, shopping, time, energy, money and to top it off, washing up.
“What busy working people really want is speedy dinners – they are the most important thing,” says Mulholland, 49. Which is why she’s developed her new book, The Batch Lady: Rapid Dinners, an interactive guide to batch cooking your way out of mundane weeknight meals. She helps you fill the freezer with nutritious dishes – from chilli honey salmon bites to a cheesy mixed bean bake and cinnamon buns with cream cheese frosting – that you can just “grab and cook”, and claw back some time and inner calm in the process.
But really, her batching principles make sense beyond dinnertime. “For me, it’s never been about the recipes as much as that ethos: saving time, saving headspace, saving money,” says the This Morning regular. “I’m about getting all of those mundane chores that we have to do day-to-day, into the easiest possible, nicest way to do them. Taking them out of your head, putting them in a little box. They’re all sorted. You now have way more time in your day to do what you want.”
Her ethos comes from her business and time management background. When Mulholland had children, she was confounded: “Where’s the time management manual for my life as a mum with two toddlers? And so I thought, ‘Right, I’m going to flip around a lot of those things I learned in business and put them into day-to-day life.”
But she is frank, even though she shares videos on batching your wardrobe and your gym kit, alongside your meals, she doesn’t manage to live in an ultra-streamlined, fully-batched way all the time. “There’s some weeks it works and some weeks it doesn’t, and quite often, I’ll say on social media, ‘Yes, I’m wearing the same cardigan for the third day in a row,’ but I try to live by it.”
Mulholland, who lives on a farm in the Scottish borders, grew up on her mum’s homemade fare. “If you got a biscuit in a packet, like a Penguin or a Viscount biscuit, it was really exciting because we grew up with homemade biscuits in a jar, which we just thought was devastating,” she remembers with a smile. “We wanted all the shop-bought stuff that everybody else got!”
She’s raised her own children, now 16 and 18, to be “very self-sufficient”. “They would set the fire at six years old. They might not light it, but they would get it ready. That would be one of their jobs when they came in from school,” she says, noting that her cookbooks, with their “grab and cook” style, are ideal for getting the kids involved in dinner prep. “We’re not asking them to be the cooker; we’re not asking them to chop a butternut squash! They’re just going to open a packet from the freezer and pour it in. I’m hugely into raising capable kids.”
She’s also a big believer in learning through play. “There’s a lot of things that people don’t realise their kids would love to do, and as they’re doing it, they are learning great skills,” she says. “Toddlers can load a washing machine! They would actually find it really good fun if you just let them put each thing in and take each thing out!
“People are running about whipping their kids to ballet for two hours, whipping them back and then getting dinner ready. That’s lovely, but how long will ballet last? Whereas if you taught your kids to make spaghetti bolognese? That’s a really good lifelong thing to know.”
Alongside Rapid Dinners coming out, Mulholland has a busy year ahead, including hosting new show Batch From Scratch: Cooking For Less on Channel 4 with Joe Swash, and turning 50. “This is my year that I feel like I am deserving of some balance,” she says, excited about all the parties and trips she has planned for her big birthday. “I am unbelievably social. You can never get me out of a party,” she says. “I love coffee and cake, and so for me, when I’m not working, it’s about seeing friends.”
She wants Rapid Dinners to end up looking like it’s had a few parties too. “I didn’t want it to be one of these interactive books that somebody feels like, if they didn’t write in it neatly on the first page, then they can’t go back to it,” she says. “I want it to be a mess. I want it to have lots of tabs hanging out of it and turned back pages. That makes me so happy. That’s how I want to see it being used!”
‘The Batch Lady: Rapid Dinners’ by Suzanne Mulholland (Ebury Press, £22).
