I was reading an article in Kansas Parent yesterday about how stocking up your pantry (like having 20 rolls of toilet paper and 8 bottles of ketchup) can help save your sanity. While I'm not exactly sure if that sort of thing would work for me (although the 20 rolls of toilet paper would be nice at times), she mentions an interesting idea that I think I may try...Once A Month Cooking.
There are several cookbooks and websites devoted to this sort of thing. One that I found last night, will actually keep track of what you should have in your freezer and you click off when you've used it. You can make shopping lists and whatnot so that you can spend one day cooking and fill your freezer for the week/month.
Now, I've been known to make a double batch of things (soup, stew, chili) and freeze them. In fact, a few weeks ago, I did it every night and had my freezer stocked with dinners so that if I didn't feel like cooking, all I had to do was defrost and reheat something. I love that. But I've never sat down and thought about deliberately filling the freezer with stuff like that (except I did do the Gourmet on the Go in Virginia, which was fun but the dinners were a little too different than the stuff we're used to eating).
Does anyone do this and have pointers?
5 comments:
I've done that, Barb. In my experience, it took aaaallll day and part of the evening. I would suggest that you do like things on one day like hamburger stuff on one day, chicken another. It's still the same concept just a lot less stressful. It's hard to leave in the middle of big batch cooking to pick kids up from school, etc. It is very nice to have stuff in the freezer. I did the doubling thing a couple of weeks before Christmas. Actually, it was more of a triple thing because I made 4 meals for Jeff's mom for Christmas. I didn't have to cook much this last week which was nice.
Funny you should talk about stocking up because I just today ordered my 1/4 cow. I've never done that before and it felt kinda weird. I will probably have to wait until March or April though until she sells the whole thing before it's butchered.
I have a freezer full of turkey stock!
Deb...I've heard of so many people ordering 1/2 cows before. The people I know who've done it swear by it. I didn't know you could just order a 1/4 cow! You'll have to let me know how that works for you cause we eat a lot of beef!
Dad...and Mom just wanted to throw the carcass away! :) I made chicken soup for dinner tonight.
I'm excited about the beef. It's from a farm in Metamora. She charges $.95/pound for the beef and then you pay to have it processed. It is processed at West Meat here in Washington. She said that each cow weighs between 1200 and 1400 pounds. I'm sure that there is a lot that is inedible though. She said it should cost about $400 including the processing. The cow was raised organtically on corn, oats and hay raised on their farm. When I asked her about payment, she said that she will send me a bill when I pick up the meat. Wow, you don't hear that every day, do you?
We had turkey noodle soup for dinner last night, LOL.
That's awesome! The people I've talked to say that you get all kinds of stuff out of it, too. Hamburger, roasts, steaks, etc. I've heard that 1/2 cow will feed a family for almost a year because you get so much meat off of it...and you know exactly where it came from! You can't beat that!
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