Cooking, Cooking and more cooking!

Yesterday my Mom and I prepared 51 meals to be frozen. Yup, you read that right. A few years ago I heard about the once a month cooking idea. At the time the work required did not seem like it was worth it. It wasn't that bad making supper each night (even though I don't really enjoy cooking). However, with 3 kids and the all too fun 4-5:30 time of the day, we were eating out more and more. It seemed that some weeks (or more) I just couldn't seem to get to the grocery store, naps overlapped or I was just too tired to cook. Living where we do, the options for eating out basically boiled down to fast food. I don't mind eating fast food once in a while, but I don't want it a staple. I want healthy food for our family. While killing way too much time on pinterest I was reminded of this idea. Long and short was that I came across the book The Big Cook. I was able to take it out of the local library and talked my Mom into doing it with me, since she is working again and doesn't always want to cook at the end of the day either. We (or actually I) chose 12 recipes to prepare. Each recipe makes 4 meals, although we made 5 out of 1 and 6 out of another since we had a bit extra of the ingredients. I will admit that this does take a bit of prep work with the grocery list and shopping. I purchased all the meat at costco and then shopped around for the best deals on the other items. It all adds up and initally you wonder if this is the best way to go. It came to about $270.00 for each of us, but divided up into 51 meals, it comes to about $10.50 per meal. Try feeding a family of 4 to 6 (what each meal serves or more) for that. Now, you do need to know that you need to add a vegetable or rice/potato to many of these meals, but that doesn't add a lot of cost and that is always the easy part. We began working about 10:15 and were done by 6:00 including meals for the kids, supper, running Katie into town to school and picking her up, taking care of the other 2 and septic problems with trades people coming by throughout the day. I will keep you posted on how they turn out, but from what we could taste they were amazing. As a whole the meals are uncooked and you bake them in the oven, slow cooker or BBQ.

So heading into the week, I no longer need to ask myself what I am going to make for supper, but what do we want to eat for supper. My freezer is full of my half of the meals and I am set for the next month. We had a blast doing this and I highly recommend trying this with some friends if you feel short on time or energy at the end of the day. Happy Cooking!