Three Big Brothers: Cooking By The Month

This type of menu planning and food preparation is a way of life. Once you've done it right one time, you become hooked. The couple of days you spend planning, shopping and cooking are not so fun and may result in sore feet (the authors of "Once A Month Cooking"*) highly recommend you wear good tennis shoes while cooking). You may wonder what in the world made you think this was a good idea. The first night or two you eat out of your freezer you won't notice much of a difference. It's a couple of weeks later when you are STILL eating out of your freezer, meals YOU like, that you know are healthful and better for you than what you would have been feeding your family that you sit back and think, "Yep.. it was worth it." The second and third months, you feel that relief much earlier because you have already spent a month (40 days in most cases for my family) seeing how valuable this new way of life is.

The purpose of this blog is to link you to my previous notes about this topic. I have someone ask me at least once a week to share with them what I do. I eventually wrote a Facebook note about it, and have two others that I usually share with them as well, because those two additional recipes are included each time I cook. I am going to link to those notes below but first I want to give a few other tips for newbies:

1. Remember that you will wonder why you decided to try this during the first cooking session. It is overwhelming at first but it gets MUCH easier each time you cook.

2. Use (borrow if you need to) a couple 10-12 quart stock pots to make your favorite soups sauces to make in bulk. I make 12 quarts of spaghetti sauce, chili, and chicken tortilla soup, the freeze each of these in quart size zip lock freezer bags. That's 30 meals right there! (Because we often open two bags of chili to feed the whole family.) The spaghetti sauce is used for more than just the traditional meal: French Bread Pizza and Calzones.

3. You can open up a lap top and watch movies during the day or listen to music or, like I do, Dave Ramsey for motivation! You save so much money cooking this way!

4. Start your day with a clean dishwasher, a sink with one side of hot soapy water, and two empty trash cans (one recycling here in Europe). And if you have an infant, a bassinet comes in handy!