Once A Month Cooking

Aren't we all looking for ways to simplify our lives?  To take things that can eat up time with our families, or take time away from what we really want to do, and make them shorter or less time-consuming?

My one thing I can't stand to do is come up with meals every night.  I don't *mind* cooking, but I find that by the time it is dinner, I haven't given one thought as to what to eat. Or, I think of something too late for it to be ready when Nick gets home. Or, I have something cooking, and I get distracted and I burn it (that's only happened once). :)  ha.

It seems like many families have the same struggle. Whether it's cleaning, cooking, doing laundry, finding quiet time--there's always something that is a struggle, that we're always scouring Pinterest for new ideas for.

Well, one of the ways that I have found to help my scatterbrained cooking problem is to do once a month cooking.  This is when I take one day, cook a bunch of meals, then freeze them to be used throughout the rest of the month.

The first time I did Once A Month Cooking was in July, 2010. Tami and I prepared meals for ourselves and for our friend Melissa who was dead-sick in her second pregnancy.  We were both teachers, and with the school year approaching, it was going to be a life-saver to not have to think about cooking after a long day of work. At that point, Melissa had a toddler and one on the way, Tami had a young baby, and I didn't have any kids--once a month cooking can work for any family. Tami had done once a month cooking before, but it was my first time. Tami took the reins of organizing (of which she is a pro) and shopping, and on cooking day we split up everything between us so that we could cook for 3 families.  All-in-all, it took us 8.5 hours. We made 66 meals for 3 families, which was 22 meals per person!  We made both lunches and dinners.  Tami used the website Once A Month Mom to help organize our menu and instructions for the day.

Here are photos from the day (not many--when you're cooking, you don't take many pics):

Our dry good groceries:

Cooking enough bread for 3 families:

Rockstar (and tiny toddler Jonas in the background--wow!)

Tami's standup freezer, full of frozen meals:

My frozen meals at the end of the day:

When I was pregnant, I decided it would probably be a good idea to get some meals set up for myself for when Nick would go back to work, and the meals provided to us by people at church were finished.  I didn't want to pay for the membership to Once A Month Meals, though. I thought, "I can put this together by myself. It can't be that hard." So, without any website help, I made 10 dinners by myself. I gathered the recipes from Pinterest I wanted, made a big grocery list, and cooked them all in one day while Nick was at work. Did I mention I was pregnant? Did I mention I was 8.5 months pregnant?  Yeah, not smart. Nick got home, and I felt like my hair was on fire.  I was scampering around in the kitchen with pots boiling over and appliances beeping, and Nick comes in and asks how my day was, and I am pretty sure I tore off his head. It wasn't a good moment.  The good thing to come out of that was that I had a good 2 shelves full of frozen meals (the bad part was that many of them I made with cheese, and then I had to go off dairy for a little while, so the meals sat. But, 5 months later they are still deelicious--I had one last night).

Basically, from then on, I decided I shouldn't do once a month cooking by myself, nor should I do it without some more resources.

This is where the website Once A Month Meals comes in.  Tricia, the mom who started the site, had been doing once a month cooking on her own for a while, and had a really great system set up for herself. When other people heard about what she was doing, they realized what a genius idea it was, and started asking her for help doing their own once a month cooking days. At that point, she decided to start a website (as any good entrepreneur would do). Since its inception over 4 years ago, she has streamlined the website into an incredible resource of recipes and menus. They publish 8 different menus every month, ranging from traditional to diet, paleo to gluten/dairy free, to baby food. These menus include typically 3-5 breakfast items, 3-7 lunch items, and 5-10 dinner items. They use seasonal grocery items to create menus that won't break your monthly grocery budget. They also do specialized mini menus every month, so if you don't have time to do a full cooking day, you can do one that has just 5 recipes--these are also formatted around one type of item, say all chicken recipes, or all salad toppings.

A lot of the things on the site are free--all the recipes have freezer instructions included. So, if you are like me, and want to try doing it on your own, you can take the recipes you like from the site, combine them, buy your own ingredients, and go to it.

BUT, if you need a little more structure (and believe me, I highly recommend it--read my story above as a cautionary tale), you can get a membership to the site. This unlocks a whole world of possibilities, including grocery lists, cooking labels for your bags, recipe cards, and instruction sheets. All the resources help you to not end the day with your hair on fire, like I did when I was pregnant. They optimize the cooking order so that, for example, you don't waste your time cooking meat 3 different times during the day. Instead, you cook all the meat once, and then divide it between the different dishes (aaaaaaahhhhh).  One of my favorite features is that the site adjusts the amounts of everything automatically for you--all you have to do is change the number of servings for your recipes and your grocery list in a little box once. No calculating!!

The membership also gets you a daily email with a bunch of helpful hints, like how to once a month cook in an apartment, or in a small kitchen, or a small freezer, and tips on how to prepare for your first cooking day.  I am SO glad that I did the first cooking day with Tami--it was like cooking with a seasoned veteran.

When I was pregnant, I said I didn't want to pay for membership to the site.  This just proves again what an idiot I am. Because membership to the site? Is a whopping 10 DOLLARS a month. That's less than a dinner at Taco Bell for my husband and I. That's less than a ticket to the movies. I was an idiot.

One of the things I am SUPER excited about is that Tricia is just unveiling a new PRO membership, which allows you to customize your own menus. Before, if you wanted access to all the awesome resources, you needed to use the menus that were already on the site. Which is fabulous--if you like all the recipes in every menu.  I, however, tend to be a picky eater, and there is usually at least one recipe item I would rather not make. Before, you would have to go through the recipes and grocery lists, and manually remove those items--or, simply give those meals away to someone else.  But now, with a pro membership, you'll be able to take this recipe and that recipe, and it will make customized recipe and grocery lists for you on the site. Can you say awesome??  What's great is that the pro membership is also extremely inexpensive for what you're getting ($14 a month).

Anyway, I decided that we needed to bring Once A Month Meals to my church.  So, I put out the call to people in our women's group and our kids club parents, to see if anyone would be interested in joining me--and lo and behold, I had 35 PEOPLE write back to say they were interested.  Umm...holy crow.

The problem with once a month cooking with 35 people is that you can't. Ha. First of all, this is Los Angeles. The dietary restrictions alone will take care of half of those people. Secondly, once a month cooking takes up a lot of time, and a lot of people here have crazy work schedules--so that got rid of a few more people. Finally, space. It's actually hard to find space where we can do this, because every place requires a rent--there's no such thing as free in LA. Plus, when you're cooking, you need to have room to move and spread out.

In the end, I decided to do once a month cooking twice. My first time was a few weeks ago. Myself, two moms from my mom group, and another girlfriend of ours did the Paleo Mini menu--5 recipes, 10 dinners.  I wanted to do a smaller-scale version to see what I needed to get in order for the larger version we would do with people from church (which was 5 dinner recipes and 4 side dish recipes--total of 18 dishes).

This is when the pro membership will really help me next time--see, we did 5 easy assembly paleo recipes (easy assembly meaning you can just throw items into baggies and freeze them--not a lot of cooking required)--but I don't eat fish, and I can't stand the taste of cilantro--so those 4 dishes I wasn't even going to use. With a pro membership, next time I will be able to change out those recipes for something else.

Two of us cooked double to give to other new moms--it was a crazy long day!

I also had Avonlea with me. I had a friend come over to watch our kids, but Avonlea still needed to take a nap at one point on me.

Our before and after pictures:

A couple of weeks later, I did once a month cooking again with another group. Originally, it was supposed to be with 8 people, but 4 of them dropped out for various reasons. This time, we did an easy assembly dinner menu and sides mini menu--another time when the pro membership would have been helpful, because I had to combine the recipes and grocery lists manually, which took a TON of time.

I also cooked this day for another mom who was supposed to join us but then ended up with a baby in the hospital--that is one amazing thing about once a month cooking--it is relatively easy to do for more than one family, so it makes an incredible hospitality gift.

Groceries for two families:

A summary of thoughts about Once A Month Meals:

• It does take TIME. I did easy assembly meals (which are basically you throw the ingredients together in a bag and you're done), and it took me around 6 hours of menu prep (because I was combining menus manually--if you follow the ready menus on the site, it won't take you nearly this long), a major grocery trip, 1 hour of night-before prep (cutting veggies), and 6 hours on my Big Cooking Day (not including cleanup).
• It is AFFORDABLE.  While the grocery bills can make you stagger (for the 2nd grocery bill, It was $250), you divide it out between your meals and servings, and it comes out to less than $8 a bag. Considering some of the meals Nick and I will have more than once, it is way less than going out to eat.  The only thing I will need to buy at the grocery store for the rest of the month are any additional perishable items we might use--but even most of those things you can freeze--we just don't have freezer room left.
• It is WORTH IT. Last night, I put a bag of dinner from the freezer into the refrigerator. Today, I put it in the crockpot. It will be done when Nick gets home. No thought, no stress, no running to the grocery store at the last minute.

Want to learn more? Visit the site Once A Month Meals.  And if you have any questions, ask me.

If you're wondering, YES I'm doing it again.

Updated to add:
Also, if you're interested in doing Once A Month Cooking on your own, I am now an affiliate for Once A Month Meals!  You can click the banner on the right side of the page, or click on this link to be directed to the site. When you sign up using the banner or the link, I get credit. Thanks!