Cooking…..How do I get that done along with everything else?

I have had many people ask me how we cook our meals in our home.  I have started doing a concept that has you cook once a for month or a couple times. 🙂  It has saved us sooooo much money and it has also saved me TONS of time.  Because of cooking with this style I have had more time to do other things…….like homeschool, read, clean and even workout. 🙂

Here is how we do it………

First I make my list of the different meals we are going to eat.  I find these Online or in a cookbook.  (We use Once-a-month Cooking by Wilson, The Freezer cooking Manual by Slagle and several others if needed).  I make 20 meals every 4 weeks.  We go to church and eat on Wednesday nights and we eat at my moms on Sundays.  I usually make 10 different meals ( I double each one to make 20 meals). I plan for 3 chicken type meals, 1 beef and one other (pork or vegetarian) for each week.  Every time I have done this we end up with enough meals for almost 5 weeks.  Something always comes up during the month or I find something on sale and we eat it instead of a pre made meal.

I then make my list of all the things I need to buy for these meals.  Yes the list is LONG.  I then separate the list by store (we buy all our meat at Sam’s Club) and make a list of the things I need to store the meals (for example, I buy the throw away metal containers for Lasagna etc., other than that I freeze everything in heavy duty Ziplock bags).

Now do your shopping!

NOw comes the fun part…..Cooking day!!!!!  I start with getting all my stuff laid out.

THen I start to cook the things that need to be cook.  FOr example I made Chicken and Rice and White Bean Chicken Chili.  Both call for cooked chicken so I cooked all the chicken together in the same pot to save on dishes and time.  🙂

I then start everything that needs to be in a crock pot ( I have 2 crockpots and both are always going during this day). 

THen I start things that go into the freezer uncooked (for example we do Heavenly Chicken, the meat is frozen raw until I choose to use it, I just assemble on my big cooking day).

I label all meals with the instructions!  This way Dave or I can just pull it out and we know what to do.  We don’t have to go look through a cookbook trying to figure out how to cook it etc.).  Also, he can make dinner with little to no help from me :).

Here is a pic of the labeled bags for Fruit Slush (a side dish).

I allow my meals to cool (if they need to) before putting int he freezer for a little bit.

NOw it is time to freeze your meals. YOu don’t need a lot of space for this!  I freeze all the meals laying flat in the freezer and just pull one out when we are ready to eat.  I then thaw it and pour it into the pan to cook 🙂 Very easy!!!!

Now the not so fun part!  Cleaning up.  Here are all my dishes I used ( and yes I made 20 meals so not too bad if you ask me).  Dave usually does the dishes for me 🙂

Here is a list of the meals I made for this month…..

Traditional Beef Stew ( 4 batches, we really love this in the winter with some warm bread)

Chicken in a pot (2 batches)

Sante Fe Chicken (2 batches)

Homemade Chicken Nuggets (2 batches)

Cranberry Chicken (1 batch)

Pizza Pasta Pie (1 batch)

Heavenly Chicken (2 batches, we LOVE this.  It has a lot of steps, but because I do it on my cooking day it doesn’t seem like so many because I have so many other things going on at the same time.  Had I not made it on a cooking day it would have seemed like a lot of work)

Chicken and Rice (2 batches)

Green Chili enchiladas (2 batches)

spinach Lasagna (2 batches)

and Four batches of Fruit Slush ( a side item to go with a meal once a week).

I then bought 10 bags of frozen veggies, a bag of potatoes, cornbread mix (a few of these) and 3 desserts (a pie, ice cream and cookies)  for under 100 dollars!!!!!!  Yup that is 25 dollars a week to feed my family (five eating people, our baby doesn’t count yet) for dinner.  And our dinners are yummy and filling! 

I will post some of the recipes that we use in the next post 🙂