Once-a-month Cooking Week

In the past I really could do a cooking day for my Once-A-Month Cooking. In fact, I did a couple of really big cooking days shortly before Lillian was expected. Since she had her own plans, we ended up eating quite a bit of that food long before she came, so I've just been making do, cooking as I could for the last several weeks. That's kind of challenging for me and more often than not here lately, I've been having Kyle bring me home a pizza from the grocery store deli, or something else easy to fix when he's on his way home for work. That is neither healthy nor cost effective, so I'm back to freezer cooking again.

However, there's still the fact that I have a newborn in the house. So here's what I'm doing. I love using the menus from Once a Month Mom. They have a GREAT selection now of different types of menus - traditional, diet, and whole foods to name a few. So I'm using the traditional menu for this month. What I'm doing is just making the recipe as I make the meal for that time of the day. So... last night I made Bacon Cheeseburger Chicken from that menu, and had dinner for the night, but also had 3 meals to freeze. I also made the breakfast cake but we ate one for dessert last night, one for breakfast this morning, and only ended up freezing one. The this morning, before picking up our friend, I froze 30 breakfast burritos, got supper started, and when we got home I made Pita Pizzas and we had them for lunch and froze 14 more. And then we're having Chicken Farfalle for supper and I've already frozen 2 more bags. This is a fabulous compromise for me - I get several meals worth of food frozen and it's all planned out for me (for free).

The kiddos were a great help making the pizzas for lunch. We had a lot of fun. Dalton especially liked helping me - he's always my helper in the kitchen.

 

 Freezer cooking isn't too bad with all the children running around. They really help me a lot - either with the food, cleaning up, or with Lillian. I think they realize that the more Mommy gets done, the more time I'll have later to play with them. We were even able to get a little school done today - that was with going to the library and cooking 12+ separate meals, and having a little baby in the house. I'm blessed to have the children I have!

Lots of people tell me that they could never freezer cook because they only have the freezer on their fridge - that's all I have, too! I thought I'd include these pictures so you could see how I stuff it all in. At the top I have the frozen veggies that I keep on hand for side dishes. I the middle I have some breakfasts (breakfast popsicles and raspberry breakfast cakes) and some lunches I've frozen. The next shelf has more meals in bags.

Right now my next to bottom shelf is mostly empty, waiting for some more meals, and the bottom drawer has all my frozen meat that is waiting for me to cook it for other recipes. So by the time I need that bottom drawer, I will have cooked everything in it. It works out pretty well for me. I have been able to get around 30 separate meals, plus a couple of bags of cookies, into this freezer at one time.