Adjusting cook times advice

[TaffyApple]

I'm getting into meal prep and bulk cooking to help my health. It's a long process because I'm battling mental health issues and my cooking ability/nutrition wasn't brilliant beforehand (long story involving fear of heat due to childhood injury.)

I recently got gifted some glass cookware/food storage which are perfect for meal prep. What I thought is that as I'm just cooking for me and since they can go from oven to freezer (once cooled), I could just use the storage cookware instead of one big dish and dividing afterwards.

So to get to my question, how would cook times be affected if I was to say put 4 small dishes in vs a big one? And is there anything I should be aware of? 

[Dominique]

I think it’s mostly a question of thawing times: individual portions will likely take less time to thaw. If you take your meals out of the freezer the night before and they have fully thawed when you start warming them again, then cook time will depend on the size of the item. Depending on what you cooked, it might be faster / more energy-efficient to do the warming on the stove rather than in the oven, even if this means transferring out of the glass cookware. 

[TaffyApple]

Thanks for the reply.

What about the food that I cook and then freeze? My theory is that individual portions will cook faster but being useless in the kitchen I'm not sure roughly how much quicker. I don't particularly want to be opening the oven and letting the heat out every few minutes.

[Dominique]

Yes, as a general rule, individual portions should cook a bit faster than the same food in a larger container. However, I don’t think it’s necessary to overthink it and check every few minutes. Cooking time is an issue primarily with raw meat and pastry. For meat (if this is a concern to you), you can use a thermal probe that will let you see how the inside of the meat is cooked without having to open the door. For almost everything else, cooking time isn’t that critical, so you can experiment and with time, will learn how long different types of foods should spend in the oven. Also, YouTube is your friend: look for recipes with suggested cooking times and temperatures. You will upgrade from "useless" to "decent" cook in no time!