I refuse to Cook this Month!

It has been a long time coming, but we’ve finally come full circle. From not cooking to not cooking. In December I realized that I had all but quit cooking. I did maybe one meal a week on the weekends. The rest of the time we ate cold cereal, snacks, and out. It was a pretty pitiful existence food wise, but time and energy just didn’t allow me to do much else. In January (on my birthday) we had our debit card number stolen and our checking and savings accounts drained. We were left with $50 to live on for the rest of the month while fraud protection got our money back. Now this may sound like a bad thing, but in reality it was a blessing in disguise. It made us wake up and realize how much we’d been spending on food and how little quality food we were really eating. So with a full freezer and food storage and $50 to buy fresh food we went through January. I got really creative and we ate better than we had in a long time. In February I decided to start meal planning and budgeting better, we discovered Dave Ramsey and learned a lot about finances we didn’t fully understand before. I cooked dinner almost every night, planned my weeks out by the sales, and only allotted $200 for groceries in February. All that money we had been wasting on food before went into savings, how cool is that?!? So enter March. I can’t keep this pace up. I am so tired of cooking. I have not cleaned much because I was cooking, I wasn’t keeping up on laundry or doing much of anything I enjoy. By the time I got home from work and made dinner I was to exhausted to do anything other than put my boy to bed and fall into bed myself. So I decided that something’s gotta give, and it had to be the daily cooking. But I still didn’t want to give up my new found budgeting ability, savings, or good food. I discovered something called “Once a Month Cooking”. Google it, you’ll get lots of good information. I’ll tell you how I did it.
First I went through my kitchen, food storage room and freezer to see what we had. Then Justen and I put proteins on a piece of paper and brainstormed all the meals we like and routinely eat off those. We used Ground Beef, Chicken, Roast, ham and Lamb. Then I chose meals with similar ingredients so the prep would go faster. We decided not to do any lamb meals for the freezer because we both prefer lamb fresh grilled, so I made twice baked potatoes to make those a quick easy meal. When all was said and done I put 24 meals in the freezer plus about 25 twice baked potatoes to use as sides. We have been eating the food so far this week and I am loving my new found freedom! I started Friday night by precooking my hamburger. Then on Saturday was my big cooking day. On Sunday I made an extra BIG Sunday dinner and finished up by making roast, boiled potatoes, and the twice baked potatoes, as well as frying the bacon and onion all at once for the spuds, and the squash soup. So here are how my meals were grouped
Ground Beef- made with 3 different sauces, cooked up on 8 lb bag with pepper, garlic, and onion. Then split into thirds.
-One Third- Red Marinara Sauce, Made into Spaghetti(x2) and Lasagna (x2)
-One third- Taco Seasoning- Froze as meat for tacos (x2) and made Taco Soup (x3)
-One third- With Mushroom Soup made Stroganoff (x2) and Shepherds Pie (x1)
Chicken- Boiled and shredded about 10lbs- made soup out of the broth
Made: - Zataran’s Jambalaya (I love this box mix, and I add an extra ½ cup white rice with each box so it’s not as spicy, then add chicken and a can of corn.) (X3)
-Chicken Stuff (casserole from the Chugg Family cook book)(X2)
-White Sauce Chicken Enchilada Casserole (I actually made a huge batch of the sour cream/ cream soup mixture that I use for both chicken stuff and this used the first half, then added the green chilies for this). (x2)
-Chicken Pot Pie(x1)
-Squash Soup (had frozen butternut squash, add chicken, and fried bacon and onion (from the second day of cooking) and then will do fresh carrots and potatoes in the crockpot with these items on the day we eat it.)(x1)
Next up we have the Ham Items
-Ham and Spud Soup (made extra potatoes with Sunday dinner for this)(x1)
-Ham Fried Rice (actually made this up earlier in the week and froze it) (x2)
And then finally on Sunday for dinner I made roast and potatoes. Then I fried the bacon for the twice baked potatoes and made those as well. So I put about 25 of those in the freezer. I had put some of them in the freezer several months ago and we really loved just pulling a few out and microwaving them as we needed them. On Sunday Garrison kept asking for Banana bread so I also went ahead and made a double batch of that and have a couple loaves in the freezer along with my frozen cookie dough for sweet treats during the month. Now it was indeed a LONG day of hard cooking. I was beat by evening. But guess what, it has been so nice this week to take a break. And the really cool part, I only had to spend $85 on ingredients I didn’t already have in the house. So now all I have to buy during the month is our 4 gallons of milk each week and a few other fresh things to keep us going. And of course since it is time for Kent’s Case Lot Sale I’ll be stocking up on staples again. Another side benefit is the amount of dishes. All of this cooking and I only ran three addition loads of dishes over the weekend. During the month my skillet would have been used 8 times to cook ground beef, but only once now for my big day. And normally during the week last month I was running at least one load a day. Well, since we have no cooking dishes, I have only had to run it once since Monday and we are now on Thursday. I’m also saving time, energy, water and dish soap with OAMC.
That is the story of coming full circle, and how to not cook for a month but still have home cooked meals. Of course we’ll still probably grill a few lamb chops on the weekends, or when Justen gets a craving but that isn’t to bad. I’ve already got my new plan started for next month, with some new meal ideas since I’m sure we’ll be sick of these by the end of the month. Now if only I could figure out how to only clean the house once a month. Or maybe monthly laundry instead of daily...oh well, a girl can dream.