Diana Chan Shares Five Kitchen Hacks for Easier Midweek Cooking

Diana Chan’s latest cookbook, The Golden Wok, is an ode to the versatility, simplicity and speed of wok-fired cooking. “Wok cooking is done, essentially, in one vessel,” Chan says. “It’s about quick cooking – so everything from really easy, midweek dinners to more elaborate stuff when you want to have a dinner party.”

Whether you’re busting out the wok or not, the former Masterchef winner knows speed is of the essence when it comes to midweek cooking. “What makes a good midweek meal is something that takes less time,” she says. “No one’s really got three hours to spend on a Wednesday night cooking.”

She’s also a master of flavour, and knows there are ways to speed things up without compromising on taste and quality – at the end of the day, you still want a delicious meal that you’ll enjoy, rather than a lacklustre dish that might’ve been easy to prepare.

But how do you strike the right balance of flavour and time when it comes to midweek cooking? Here are her top tips to get you started.

Prep your herbs and ingredients

Meal-prepping is always a handy midweek shortcut, and Chan recommends having some cooked meals on hand. “Slow-cooked meals – curries and stews and stuff like that – just have them in portions and frozen.” But you don’t have to have the whole thing cooked ahead of time – having just some key ingredients prepped and ready in the fridge can make things much easier.

“You can very easily get your herbs, pluck them when you have time, keep them and store them properly in the fridge, and then it’s ready to go,” Chan says. “When you want to use it, it’s not like you have to go buy the ingredient, wash it, and all that sort of stuff, because all that takes time.” As for how to keep those prepared herbs fresh, Chan recommends wrapping delicate herbs in a damp tea towel and storing them in an airtight container until you need them.

A meal kit like QuiteLike

Can’t be bothered to organise those ingredients yourself? Thankfully they already come portioned out and ready to use in meal kits – the ultimate shortcut for getting great food on the table fast. QuiteLike offers a complete package of ingredients and recipes: like chicken schnitzel with caesar salad; lamb shawarma wraps; miso butter beef with soba noodles; Thai-style chicken larb; spicy chipotle salmon; and more. The menu changes with the seasons too, so expect to see Chan’s suggestion of slow-cooked curries and stews when the weather drops.

“I think these are good service offerings that are available to us,” Chan says, explaining why QuiteLike is her pick of meal kits out there. “They’re healthy, they’re quick, they’re delicious. You don’t have to go shopping – it’s all weighed out in quantities. There’s a recipe there, so anyone can follow a recipe and do it, and that should save you a whole lot of time.” Plus, there are images accompanying each step, so you’ve got visual aids as you make the recipes.

Frozen seafood

While a freezer stocked with meat is almost a no-brainer, Chan recommends seafood as a midweek option because it tends to defrost much more quickly. “Seafood, to me, is one of the easiest things to have and [easier] to defrost instead of meat,” she says.

The world is your oyster, but Chan has a couple of frozen seafood staples worth stocking up on. “I always have some prawns handy and it’s not [necessarily] a whole bag of prawns – I might have six or seven prawns and then I can add them to vegetables and then create a dish,” she says. “Fillets of fish and also some scallops, because scallops are always handy to have and used a lot in Chinese cooking.”

Make-ahead curry paste

Buying a jar of curry paste is fine, but there’s truly no substitute for something homemade. It’s a world apart in freshness and flavour, but not quite appropriate for making from scratch in the middle of the week. “Making curry paste takes a long time – by the time you go and get all the aromatics and put them all together and blend, that takes a lot of time,” Chan says. The trick? Make your curry paste ahead (when you’ve got more time, maybe on the weekend) and portion it out so it’s all ready to go.

“Put it in either an ice cube tray or little containers and then freeze them,” says Chan. “If you’re stuck for a midweek dinner, you can grab some [chicken] thigh fillet – you’ve [already] got the curry paste at home – and you can make a chicken curry or a Thai green curry.”

Handy kitchen tools

Getting a meal on the table in good time is all about efficiency, and there are a few bits of kitchen kit that’ll make things much easier. For Chan, a microplane for grating and a mandolin for quick slicing are good places to start.

“Invest in good kitchen equipment,” she says. “I think mandolins are great because if I need a cucumber sliced really thinly [and] very quickly, or an onion, it takes like 30 seconds. If I need to make pickles, salads, whatever, it’s really quick and easy.”

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with QuiteLike.