Once a Month Cooking

My trip to the grocery store last night was a clear reminder that things aren't getting any cheaper for a family of seven.  The price of butter alone has gone up at least seventy cents in the last 6 months.  Trying to live within a budget and still feed my family food that truly nourishes their bodies is becoming more and more challenging by the month.  Even the sale price for the chicken breasts didn't make the cut this week, so I resorted to buying two whole chickens.  With the help of some timely coupons I was able to get the organic chicken for less than the regular, and I took them home and fell back on my Once-a-Month cooking skills to make them ready to use in recipes over the next few days.

Once-a-Month cooking is when you plan your dinner menu for the month (or week, or every two weeks...it's up to you) and set aside a weekend to buy, organize, cook and freeze each of your meals.  Then you have a LOADED freezer of  healthy and convenient meals for you family.   I learned how to do all this through two cookbooks entitled "Frozen Assets: Cook for a Day, Eat for a Month"  and " Once-A-Month Cooking, Revised and Expanded: A Proven System for Spending Less Time in the Kitchen and Enjoying Delicious, Homemade Meals Every Day" 

There's a bit of a learning curve involved, but it is worth it.  Honestly, I haven't been faithful to do this since my last child was born, but I think the economy may drive me back to it. It is much easier to avoid eating out when you know you have a healthy, cooked meal waiting for you at home.  And as we know, eating out has to be one of the biggest of all money wasters when you are trying to tighten the purse strings.  Cooking from scratch is not only economical but it is also devoid of preservatives and other unwanted ingredients that frequent the freezer aisle of your grocery store. (ie, MSG, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Hydrogenate Vegetable Oil, etc....obviously a blog for another day.)  (An extra tid-bit: Many moons ago I learned how to make my own cream soups so I could avoid the soup cans at the store with all the extra no-no's in their ingredients.  It is simple, quick, and cheap and I learned how to do this from the following cookbook:  "More-With-Less Cookbook (World Community Cookbook)")



Now that my youngest is 3,  I believe my life has settled down enough that I could resume my Once-a-Month cooking to provide healthy, made-from-scratch meals that are on-the-go ready for the spontaneous Zwemkes.  If only we still had our freezer.  I know that I can accomplish it with the freezer on my fridge, but it was so easy with my freezer chest on the back porch.  When we enclosed the back porch this summer to make the much needed play room, we no longer had room for the freezer-chest.  I may have to put my big girl panties on and fit those meals into the freezer I have.