Once-a-Month Cooking

 One way to be frugal is to cook an awful lot of food at one time.  You buy in bulk, cook in bulk, freeze in bulk, and then eat it slowly over the next few weeks.  This is called "once-a-month cooking" or sometimes, "freezer cooking" and it is something that both intrigues and frightens me.  My freezer is constantly being used with best intentions and then stuff just sits.

After the jump find some resources for how to plan such an endeavor and a treasure trove of recipes to use when you decide to take the plunge.

 


A Primer on Once-a-Month Cooking:

This is actually a fairly straight forward process, but it is helpful to have a series of steps laid out.  The common sense summary (more detail about each step at the actual blog post): 

1) Pick a Day

2) Gather grocery flyers

3) Plan your meals around the deals

4) Make your shopping list(s) to take advantage of the best prices

5) Go shopping

6) Cook

7) Freeze

Frugal Mom also had a number of excellent recipe posts:

Once-a-Month Chicken Recipes

Once-a-Month Beef Recipes

Once-a-Month Soup Recipes

There were a few good freezer tips too, my favorite of which were:

a) let your food cool down before putting it in the freezer

b) date everything!

c) frozen meat and poultry in sauce will keep 5-6 months

d) sauces and soups will keep 5-6 months

Freezer Cooking with Slow Cooker Recipes:

This is a brilliant idea.   Rather than precooking all of your monthly meals and then freezing, this blog shows you how to prep freezer bags with all of the ingredients needed to make a delicious slow cooker recipe.  It will provide a lovely alternative throughout the month to thawing and reheating.  Plus prep work is a snap, all you are doing is chopping veggies and assembling the bags.  This is a great speed option.  When you do this, all you need to do the day of is:

Take out of freezer and set on counter for about 30 minutes, then dump contents of bag into slow cooker. Cook on high for 4 hours, or low for 8 hours.

Can you get any easier than that?

Now that it's Fall, I can't wait to try this recipe especially:

Stephanie's Goulash
3 cups chopped onions
2.5 cups coarsely chopped green sweet peppers
4 large beets, peeled and diced
2 cups of carrots
3 cloves garlic, minced
3 pounds beef stew meat, cut into one inch cubes
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
4 teaspoons Hungarian paprika or regular paprika (I used regular)
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
4 cups hot cooked noodles
1/2 dairy sour cream

How to keep Once-a-Month from getting boring:

My biggest problem with cooking (and why I don't update this blog often enough) is that I get stuck in a rut.  Cook a chicken -- make the same 5 leftover recipes with only a little variation.  It's tasty, healthy, and easy to do.  But it can get boring.  The blog linked above is the solution to all your woes.  42 (and counting) recipes friendly to bulk cooking and freezing.  Everything from Almost No-Knead Bread to Thai Beef Stir-Fry.  This is a great inspiration page.

How to keep Once-a-Month from turning into Lasagnas-R-Us:

The above link is to one of my favorite magazines, "Eating Well."  They put together a beautiful 25 page slide show of healthy Freezer-friendly recipes.  These recipes are all easy to cook, tasty, and above all healthy (though not always the most frugal). Recipes from Cumin-Scented Wheat Berry-Lentil Soup to Ragout of Pork & Prunes to Chile & Beer Braised Brisket and everything in between.

Bonus Tip from Biggie at Lunchinabox.net:
This is one of my favorite tips from Biggie's blog...

A standard tip for freezing ground foods or thick sauces in small portions is to first put the food into a large freezer bag and press it out as flat as possible, eliminating air pockets. (Making it thin speeds up defrost time due to the increased surface area, and pressing out excess air guards against freezer burn.) Use a long chopstick or ruler to create divisions within the food, forming individual portions. This way when you freeze the entire bag, you’ll be able to quickly break off just as much as you want to use, no more.

 Why didn't I think of that?

Now that I have all of these resources in one place, I may try to do a batch of once-a-month cooking recipes soon.  If and when I do, expect updates and reviews!

Credits
Image: My Freezer a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from sporkist's photostream