Meal Planning - How to Get Started and Save Money with Once a Month Cooking

The concept of once a month cooking is basically to do a bunch of prep work (food preparation) ahead of time so that you can have the convenience of quickly prepared meals from your freezer later.  There are actually some retail locations that offer this concept where you go and use their kitchen to do all your meal assembly, but it can be costly.  Doing the same meal prep in your own home can save you a significant amount of money, especially if you’re like many who are looking for ways to do cooking on a budget.  Below you’ll learn some strategies and must-haves to get you started saving a bundle with once a month cooking (also referred to as bulk cooking or freezer cooking.) 

• Resealable freezer bags – you’ll need different sizes (gallon, quart, even snack size) because you’ll be storing various amounts of food items.
• Masking tape – a great solution for labeling containers that don’t have the space or ability to write on them.
• Permanent marker – A good Sharpie will take you a long way so that you can label and put dates on containers or bags. Tip: If you get a fine tip Sharpie you’ll be able to fit more information on your masking tape label.
• Tupperware – Just as with the freezer bags, you’ll need a several sizes of these containers. If you have the space, both in your freezer and cabinets, having a lot of these type containers allows you to keep bag waste at a minimum.
• Extra large airtight containers – there are some dry ingredient mixes that you may want to make one or more gallons at a time of to have on hand to save time, so you’d need an extra large container for that. If you have them, use extra large pickle jars or the gallon mayo jugs.
• Time – reserve a block of time (a few hours) to do all of your bulk cooking.
• Canning jars – you can usually find these pretty cheap in the grocery store or the craft store and they are great to have on hand for jams and other canning activities. They are also great to have for craft projects and storage of hostess gifts (jams, dry soup recipe ingredients …)
• Metal baking pans with lids – there are both disposable and permanently reusable ones available. These are great for when you are taking a meal to someone else’s house or to a party because they are relatively inexpensive and it won’t matter if you don’t get it back. These can also be used for your assembly cooking; they can go from freezer to oven, which is nice.
• Ice cube trays – these come in handy for all sorts of things, like baby food, sauces, pastes, soups, and stocks. If you don’t want to buy a whole bunch of these, just buy a couple or a few, freeze your sauce or stock and then transfer the frozen cubes to a freezer bag and reuse the ice cube tray for the next thing.
• Freezer – most things that you’ll be bulk prepping will need to go in the freezer. If you’ve embraced this bulk prepping of meals then it would benefit you to invest in a stand-alone freezer if you don’t already have one. An upright freezer would be best, but you can make a chest work just fine as long as you stay organized.

Most people think of bulk or once a month cooking as freezer cooking, but not all of it has to be.  There are four main categories:

• Dry mixes and spice blends – this would include spice rubs for meats, batches of dry baking mixes, dry soup bases, pizza crust, and more.  You can start here if you’re short on freezer space and saving up for that extra freezer.
• Canning – you can save a lot of money by doing your own canning.  You can make homemade glazed or roasted nuts, spaghetti sauce, jams and more.  Canning, like dry mixes, is another great way to get started into bulk cooking if you don’t yet have the freezer space.
• Dry ingredient kits – these, too, can be stored in a cabinet or pantry.  You can create lots of different make-ahead dry kits for things such as Asian coleslaw, grab and go lunch snacks, hamburger or tune helper kits, and more.
• Freezer cooking – here’s where that extra freezer comes in handy.  All kinds of meals can be prepped ahead of time and frozen: appetizers, some desserts, restaurant knock-offs, and many, many other dinner entrees.  You can easily find tons of great recipes to do this with, many of which are specifically for freezer cooking.

Once-a-month cooking can be a daunting task, especially if you’re new to it.  Once you get started, you really just need to figure out what works best for you and organize it in a way that works for you and your family.  That being said, here are a few tips to get you going:

• Mix and match storage – as you do more you’ll get a better feel for what works best for you.  For me, a varied selection of storage options that are as consistent as possible works best for me.
• Batch size – many people think that bulk cooking is all about family sized meals, but it doesn’t have to be.  Smaller portions can be frozen for people who are single or families where timing issues arise and sit-down meals together are occasionally not an option, so having stored options in different batch sizes would give you that flexibility.
• Smart purchases of appliances or gadgets – when you start bulk cooking, you may be so excited that you feel the need to buy all the gadgets and appliances that you’ve read or been told you may need.  You may end up spending so much on these things that it outweighs the money you are saving by doing the bulk cooking.  To avoid that, make sure to take the time to discover your personal cooking style and, decide what you’ll most likely be cooking/prepping regularly, and then decide what you really can’t do without.
• Assembly line prep – you can use this for packaging up your menu items, as well as for the creation of the mixtures.  Things like quiches, restaurant knock off meals, and some dry ingredient kits would take easily to assembly-line prep.
• Time – depending on your experience with this kind of prep work, you may take a few hours to complete meals for a month, or you may need to take two to three days to complete it.  If it’s new to you, don’t take on too much at once or you’ll go crazy.  Try to get a system down that works for you so that you don’t get overwhelmed and you can be consistent and maybe even look forward to it?
• Stack the bags flat – if you’ve been at it for a while, then you probably already know this.  If you’re new to freezer cooking, then you need to know this.  If you make up a batch of, say, sauce and you pour it into a zip lock bag and toss it on the freezer shelf you may be surprised to find that it’s pretty difficult to pry it off of the wire rungs of the shelf that it has frozen to.  The trick is to fill each bag three quarters full, seal the bag, and then stack them flat on the freezer shelf.  Once they are frozen, either keep them stacked like that or stack them vertically for easy grabbing.
• Containerizing – if you’ll be packing up a lot of snack size bags or dry ingredient kits, placing all of the small baggies into a larger container or even into a gallon size baggie will be extremely helpful.
• Themed prep sessions – This concept comes in handy especially if you happen to come across a food item that’s seasonal or on sale and you end up with an abundance of it.  Stock up on potatoes when they go on sale and cook yourself a mountain of mashed potatoes to freeze in several serving sizes.  If you remove the potatoes from the skins, save the skins for appetizers some other day, too.  The same goes for things like chicken – if it goes on sale for a great price, buy several months worth and cook and freeze only recipes that include chicken.
• Flash freezing – this is for when you cook batches of things such as chicken breasts or drumsticks, breaded eggplant or veal slices – things that you want to serve in a batch but don’t want sticking together in the freezer container.  To do this, you need a free shelf in the freezer.  Space out the items that you want to flash freeze on a cookie sheet and freeze until they are frozen solid, then transfer them in the amounts that you want into your storage containers.
• Start small – you’ll be surprised how a single large batch of spaghetti sauce can easily result in a dozen flat frozen freezer bags.  Simply doing that can easily save you from cooking dinner once a week for three months.  Also, if you’re not into eating leftovers – freeze them for a later date.  If you’re feeling up to some more prep work, make some batches of large dry mixes.  Start small and work your way up to creating meals for a month in one session – you’ll save your sanity this way!