The particular difficulty of cooking in Ramadan is that the work peaks exactly when your energy is lowest. You are fasting, it is late afternoon, and the meal has to be ready at a fixed minute. Do that for thirty days and the cooking becomes the thing you dread rather than the thing you look forward to.
Almost all of it can be moved. Here is a plan for shifting the work away from that last hour.
Start before Ramadan does
The week before is the most valuable cooking week of the month. You are not fasting yet, and everything you make now is an evening you get back later.
Fill the freezer with the labour-intensive things
These are the items that take real effort and freeze perfectly raw:
- Samboosa — make several hundred, freeze flat on trays, then bag them. Fry from frozen; they are better for it.
- Kibbeh — the shaping is the work, and it is done once.
- Spring rolls and pastries — same principle.
- Meat and vegetable fillings — even if you fold fresh, having the filling done removes most of the job.
- Stock — chicken or lamb, in one-litre portions. Soup is the backbone of iftar and good stock is the difference between a fine soup and a memorable one.
- Dough — bread and pastry dough both freeze well. If you have a stand mixer, one afternoon with the dough hook produces a month of bread.
Prepare the components, not the meals
Full cooked meals in the freezer sound efficient and rarely get eaten. Components get used constantly. Fried onions, crushed garlic and ginger, chopped coriander and parsley, toasted nuts, spice mixes measured into jars, lemon juice frozen in ice cube trays — each of these removes five or ten minutes from every single cooking session.
The shape of a workable iftar
The plan that survives thirty days looks something like this:
- Dates and water — nothing to prepare.
- Soup — made in a batch every three days, reheated. Lentil soup in particular improves on the second day.
- One fried or baked item — from the freezer.
- A salad — chopped in the morning, dressed at the last minute.
- One main dish — and this is where the effort goes.
- Something sweet — made the day before.
- A cold drink — prepared in advance and chilled.
Six things, five of which were finished hours ago. That is the whole trick.
Cook in the morning, not the afternoon
This is the single biggest change most households can make. Cooking while fasting is harder in the late afternoon than it is at 10am, for obvious reasons — you are more tired, more dehydrated, and the smell of food is a test of patience.
Moving the main cooking to the morning means the afternoon becomes reheating and assembly. It also means you can taste in the morning — not while fasting, of course, but if you cook the day's main dish the night before, you can season it properly instead of guessing.
Drinks: prepare them the day before
Everyone underestimates drinks. At iftar the whole table wants something cold at the same moment, and making it fresh at that moment is a scramble.
Jallab, qamar al-din, tamarind, laban, lemon and mint — all of these can be made the day before and left in the fridge. Frozen drinks are a particularly good answer for a Ramadan table because they can be started well in advance and served in minutes, and a machine like the Ninja Slushi turns juice into a frozen drink without the icy, watery result you get from a blender. For households with children, this reliably becomes the thing they look forward to.
Desserts you can make ahead
Dessert is where the make-ahead principle pays off most, because almost every good one improves with resting time.
- Mahalabia and rice pudding — need to set anyway, so make them the night before.
- Basbousa and cakes — better on day two once the syrup has soaked through.
- Kunafa — assemble in the morning, bake before iftar.
- Ice cream — the ultimate make-ahead. If you have a machine like the Ninja CREAMi, freeze the base 24 hours ahead and spin it in a couple of minutes when you want it, which means a fresh dessert every night without a fresh dessert's effort.
- Fruit and cream — the one that takes no work at all and that people actually want after a heavy meal.
Suhoor, planned the night before
Nobody makes good decisions at 3am. Set suhoor out before you go to bed.
Things that work: overnight oats, laban and dates, eggs that only need a pan, foul that was made in a batch, bread already sliced, fruit already cut. Things that do not: anything requiring a recipe, and anything very salty, which will make the day harder.
A blender with pre-portioned smoothie bags in the freezer makes a two-minute suhoor that is genuinely good for you — a system like the Ninja Professional Plus kitchen system covers both that and the daytime food prep.
Cook once, eat twice
Every time you cook, ask what else this could become. Roast chicken tonight is stock tomorrow and sandwiches at suhoor. A large pot of lentil soup is three nights of starter. Rice cooked in quantity becomes a fried rice dish later in the week.
Hosting takes this further. If people are coming on Thursday, cook double on Tuesday.
On waste
Ramadan is when the most food is cooked and, uncomfortably, when the most is thrown away. Some of it is unavoidable in a month built around hospitality, but a few habits help: cook to the number of people who will actually be there, put leftovers into containers while you clear rather than the next morning, and send guests home with food rather than letting it sit in your fridge until Sunday.
For what genuinely cannot be eaten — peels, shells, bones, plate scrapings — a food recycler such as the FoodCycler Eco 3 deals with the smell problem that a kitchen bin develops fast in a Doha spring, and cuts the volume of what goes out by most of its bulk.
The week-one checklist
- One afternoon of folding and freezing pastries.
- A batch of stock, portioned and frozen.
- Onions fried, garlic and ginger crushed, herbs chopped and stored.
- Spice mixes measured into labelled jars.
- Two drinks made and chilled.
- Suhoor for the first three days decided and shopped for.
Do that and the first week runs itself, which is the week that usually sets the tone for the rest of the month.
Ramadan Kareem from all of us at Autohome. Browse the Home & Kitchen collection, or read our make-ahead Eid dessert guide.
