Once a Month Cooking

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A few years ago, I read about freezer cooking or once-a-month-cooking. I even gave it a try with so-so results. The recipes I tried called for the chicken to be cooked before freezing and they just never tasted great when they came out of the freezer. And they were only chicken recipes.

Then, I found Life as Mom. She started talking about freezer cooking and the meals she was making just looked so good. They were normal recipes! So, I started thinking about it some more. A year ago for my birthday, Phillip gave me Once a Month Cooking by Mimi Wilson and Mary Beth Lagerborg. I even planned a freezer cooking day of my own last year, but just couldn't pull it off because I didn't have anyone to watch Emily. So I abandoned the idea.

Until now.

A couple weeks ago, I decided I was going to jump in and do it. I picked this Saturday and picked out one of the two week cycles in my cookbook (only rejecting one recipe due to too much dairy). Each meal makes 4+ servings (some up to 10 or so!) so these 13 meals will make about 20 meals for us...easily enough to last 3-4 weeks.

I'm so excited. I spent last Wednesday doing much of the planning and grocery list making and container list making and supplies list making because I just couldn't wait. Today was the big shopping day and it didn't take as long as I thought it would. I've never picked out meat before (other than chicken breasts, frozen fish and ground beef) so that part was a bit of an adventure, but I made it. I'd read somewhere that you can ask the meat department to cut up ham for you, so I had them slice it for me. Now all I have to do with that is dice it.

Are you curious yet as to what I'm making? Well, here's the list:

Spaghetti Sauce (next time, I'll probably use my own recipe, but I wanted to follow their recipes as close as I could this time)
Baked Fish (tilapia) in Spaghetti Sauce
Baked Jambalaya
Stuffed Pork Chops
Twelve-Boy Curry
Cranberry Chicken
Sweet Soy Marinated Chicken
Karen's Barbecued Chicken
Chili Hamburgers
Beef Goulash
Caraway Pot Roast
Taco Soup
Marinated Flank Steak
Fiesta Shrimp Dinner (rejected because of too much cheese...no easy way to make it dairy free)

The cookbook even offers some suggestions for what to serve with the dishes, though many of them I probably won't use. However, I'm planning to try some new side dishes or at least ones I haven't made in a while because I won't be making a main dish every night.

So, that's where I am right now. Super excited about trying this and hoping that they all taste good! I'll try to take some pictures along the way (if I can remember) and post about how the day went. I'll be taking a break in the middle to go to an Easter egg hunt so I hope I don't lose my momentum too much. As excited as I am, I don't think I will!