Once a Month Cooking

[Close2MyHeart]

My friend and I are embarking on this venture next weekend (the 28th is the day we're cooking) We have our recipes and a 'plan'. Anyone else try this and have any tips for us??

[poetmom]

Have read about this, and would like to give it a try, but unfortunately we don't have the freezer space, or the room to put in a large freezer. Hopefully when we get moved out of this apartment and into a house!!!

[Punkie]

I do a modified version of it. I've found that it works much better for us when I double and triple recipes, rather than doing one big day of cooking. Also, its really hard to find dairy free OAMC recipes, so that's a big challenge for us.

[Beyond Blessed]

I :heart this! WEAR TENNIS SHOES!!!!!! My feet killed me when I went barefoot (the "rule" in our house). Clean out the fridge so you have room to cool the meals before you freeze them. Ummm...I doubled and tripled recipes that I thought we would like. If I think of any more tips I'll post them. :)

[Hopeful]

I LOVE OAMC too!!

I've been doing it for about 3 years now.

Tops tips:
- only cook recipes you know your family will eat...sounds obvious but it's easy to get carried away!
- I've found that so-called OAMC recipes that are just marinaded meats are not really time savers. After all, you still have to do something with the meat once you defrost it.
- Choose multipurpose recipes. Like making lots of spaghetti sauce with ground beef in it. Once you've made this basic recipe, you can then transform it into so many things (bologenese, lasagna, chicken cacciatore, sloppy joes, etc) and then freeze these dishes.
- don't choose too many recipes that require you to cook them before freezing. For instance, some recipes call for cooked ground beef anf then cooking it in sauce for 20min before freezing it. I find this very time and energy consuming. Other recipes require assembling, no cooking, prior to cooking. they may use cooked ground beef/chicken but that's no trouble if you've cooked them before hand in large quantities.

A great site is www.30daygourmet.com. their organizing software is very good!

Deborah Taylor-Hough also has great recipes. She has a website and has also written Frozen Assets.

Another site is www.organizedhome.com

Happy cooking!