I thought it might be helpful to some of you, if I showed you what a day of once-a- month cooking looks like. It really differs for everyone, and it is not even always the same for me. It depends on how many meals I plan to make, which is dependent on what events we have going on during that time period.
For example, if we have horseback riding lessons that night at 6:30, we have to be there by 6:00 to tack up. My last three children get home from school at 4:30, which is too early to eat, but it is not too early to start preparing food. Some of the frozen casseroles and other meals that I make need to bake for an hour. Putting them into the oven at 4:30 would pull them out at 5:30 and cause us to rush during dinner, which is not the way I like spending my dinner time. In addition, cleaning up dinner would have to take place around 8pm when we are finally back home. Not fun. So, those nights are when we make hot dogs, macaroni and cheese or spaghetti. I try to make more simple meals on nights that we are really busy, that don’t need a lot of cooking time.
So I have already done all the preparations up until the actual day of cooking. Now it is time to get started on making the meals.
The first thing I do, is remove all of the recipes I plan to prepare from the binder I store them on. They are in sheet protectors to keep them clean during cooking and they wipe clean easily. I then make sure I have all of the ingredients handy for the meals I plan to prepare. If I am doing a large amount of hamburger meat based meals, I usually cook the meat all together in a large pot. It takes a little extra time doing it that way, and needs to be stirred often, however it still beats having to cook a separate batch for each recipe.
The same goes for other items. If I need to crock-pot a roast or ham or something like that, I usually start that on Friday night so it is all ready on Saturday morning when I get to work.
An average freezer cooking or Once-a-Month-Cooking session takes about 4-6 hours not including crock-pot cooking time.
More on this later today in A Deeper Look Into a Once a Month Cooking Session.
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