Eid ul-Adha: what to have in before the meat arrives.

Clear the freezer a week before, not on the morning

The most common Eid ul-Adha mistake is discovering at two in the afternoon, with trays of meat on the counter, that the freezer is still full of things nobody has eaten in months. Empty it a week ahead. Cook or discard whatever is old, defrost it if it has iced up, and decide roughly which shelf will take which cut, so packing is not being improvised with wet hands and a queue behind you.

It is worth deciding in advance how much you are keeping, too. The meat is traditionally divided three ways — one share for the household, one for relatives and friends, one for those in need — and the two shares that leave the house need bags, boxes and somewhere to stage them. That is a planning problem, not a fridge problem, and it is much easier solved the week before.

The packing kit, bought before the day

Every item here is easy to forget and impossible to find on the morning itself. Set the whole lot out on a clear counter before anything arrives.

• Freezer bags in two sizes, and more of them than you think. One bag per meal is the rule that makes the whole system work later.
• Cling film, foil, and butcher paper if you can get hold of it.
• A permanent marker and masking tape for labelling. Write the cut and the day it went in.
• Two or three large trays or a paraat for sorting, and a colander for draining.
• Kitchen roll, in quantity. Drying the meat before it is bagged is the difference between a clean freeze and a bag full of ice crystals.
• A board and a sharp knife kept only for raw meat, and a second set for everything else.

Portion by dish, not by weight

Weighing out equal one-kilo bags feels tidy and then makes every single meal awkward. Portion by what your kitchen actually cooks instead, and the freezer turns into a menu you can read at a glance.

• Karahi cuts and chanp in meal-sized bags, bone in, because that is where the flavour of a karahi comes from.
• Boti for tikka and seekh, cubed before it is frozen, so nobody is sawing at a frozen block later.
• Keema pressed flat in the bag rather than balled up. Flat freezes faster and thaws in a fraction of the time.
• Nalli, paye and bones bagged separately, for yakhni and for a long slow pot on a lazy day.
• Kaleji, gurda and dil kept out of the freezer altogether. They are eaten on the first evening for a reason, and freezing does them no favours.

The masala shelf the first two days need

Whatever else runs out, the first forty-eight hours run on onions, tomatoes and adrak-lehsan. Fresh meat gets cooked simply and constantly — tikka boti in the afternoon, kaleji fry in the evening, karahi the next day, biryani for whoever turns up — and nearly all of it starts from the same short list.

• Onions and tomatoes by the bagful, plus green chilli, dhania and podina.
• Ginger and garlic. Grind a jar of paste the day before rather than during.
• Dahi for marinating, and kachri or raw papaya if your family tenderises boti that way.
• Whole garam masala, black pepper, zeera and salt, plus tikka or karahi masala if you use ready mixes.
• Lemons, plenty of them, for marinades and for the table.

Cleaning up is the part nobody stocks for

By the evening the kitchen has handled raw meat all day and every surface in it has been used. Have the cleaning half ready before anything arrives rather than after: dishwashing liquid, scrubbers, something that cuts grease on the hob, heavy bin bags, and cloths you can dedicate to raw-meat surfaces and then wash separately from everything else.

Keep the raw and cooked sides of the kitchen apart while you work. Separate boards, separate knives, and hot soapy water on anything that has touched raw gosht before it touches anything else. It is ordinary butchery-day practice, and it is far easier to keep to when the supplies are already on the counter instead of somewhere in a cupboard behind the trays.

The week after: cooking down the mountain

By the third day the household is tired of beef, and that is exactly when a chicken night, a daal and rice night or a plain sabzi is worth more than another karahi. Those ingredients should already be in the house, because the week after Eid is nobody's favourite week to go shopping. A bag of chicken in the freezer and a few days of sabzi in the fridge will do more for morale than the fourth consecutive tikka.