Once a Month Cooking

I decided to try something new this month. For Christmas, my MIL had given me a cookbook with the above title. Basically it gives you choices or 4- 15 day menus and 2-30 day menus. In the book are the basics of how cooking once a month works and how you can tailor the recipes to fit your family. Basically the goal is to take one day to make all 30 meals. You then freeze them to be pulled out on what ever day you choose, thaw, cook and enjoy.

I LOVE to make homemade, healthy meals, but due to the fact that I do not get home from work till close to 4:30, it makes it a little difficult. I manage to do it but then we eat late and it feels like the kids go straight to bed after dinner. We were sacrificing family time that I so desperately wanted to cook. So I decided to be adventurous this month and test it out. Now I modified it a bit to fit our needs. We like to have pizza every now and then, so I made sure that we would still have our pizza nights and I also made sure that we had some of our favorites through out the month. I also left days for leftover nights. That way, we could eat a hodge-podge of leftovers and it wouldn't crowd the fridge. So I went through the cookbook and picked out 15-20 recipes and made my list. Now if you follow the meal plans they have in the book, they give you the shopping list. Since I chose meals from each of the menus, I made my own list. Then we hit Sams. I will have to admit- we spent much, much more that I normally would on the first shopping trip, but I had to remember that I was cooking a bunch of meals at once.

I also broke my cooking up into several days. This way I wasn't taking a whole day away from the kids. I will say I drove Matt nuts during this time. He had to smell everything I made, but couldn't taste it! :) I also cleaned dishes as I went- I probably did about 5 loads of dishes over the 2 days. But in the end it was worth it. So you ask....what did I make? Each night I will highlight the meal that we had and will post the recipe. I will give you a hint that this time I did many meals that are either a casserole in a bag, or have meats in a marinade that will go in the crock pot.

Check back tomorrow for my first review: Mexican Chicken Lasagna!