Some Finished Product

10 lbs of ground beef. We'll do the other 10 pounds tomorrow! This meat is all going into meals for friends.
















This is chicken spaghetti. It's a recipe I made up a short time ago. This is our first time using it as a "freezer meal." Hopefully it works well! It's always nice to have new things that work well.














These are cheese stuffed shells. It's our first month trying these, too. They are out of the cookbook The Freezer Cooking Manual by Nanci Slagle. It's an invaluable resource to once a month cooking and I highly recommend it if you are at all interested in getting started. You can buy your copy here.













At last! A finished product! I freeze most things in gallon size freezer bags or 9x13 pans. If you're short on 9x13s, check your local Goodwill or hit garage sales. I have several 9x13s for which we've paid $1 or less. The huge advantage of freezer bags is that they lay flat, saving you valuable freezer space. But I would be lying if I didn't tell you that my favorite part of using freezer bags is throwing them away when I'm done. Don't ask me why, but it's a thrill to me to prepare a meal by dumping it from a bag to a pan, then throwing away the bag. No prep dishes!!
Label bags with permanent marker before putting in the food and be sure to squeeze out as much air as possible before sealing them. I generally label the bag with its contents (minestrone and chili can look a lot a like when you're in a hurry and bags aren't labeled) and the date I plan to serve it.

Ingredients

Here is a sampling of the food we will be using for our cooking this weekend. Most of it was purchased on sale throughout the past month or two. The rest was purchased at Aldi.

We hit the Hy-Vee and Fareway sales on chicken quarters and stocked up on two 10 pound tubes of ground beef when it was priced at $1.99/lb.




I've become a bit obsessed with coupon shopping. I joined The Grocery Game which gives me a list of what's on sale and what coupon(s) to pair with it for maximum savings. One of my great thrills right now is to have $30 in coupon savings, sometimes in each store! In my area, the list is available for Hy-Vee, Walgreens, and Super Target. Money Saving Mom's blog is also an outstanding, and free, resource.

Ahhh, the perishables. We buy all of our milk, eggs and butter at Aldi. Their milk averages a dollar less per gallon than their local competitors. In the bowl we have some of the chopped onions. I do one chopped onion per pound of beef and one chopped bell pepper per 2 pounds of beef. In other words, a 10 pound tube of ground beef is browned with 10 onions and 5 bell peppers. I was also thrilled to print off 2 $5 off of 5 Kraft items this week, making my cream cheese cost $.83 and the shredded cheese cost $1.04 per bag. For the cheese I didn't have a coupon for, I purchased it in brick form at Aldi and we'll shred our own.

Kiss the Cook!!!!

Planning is Big

Planning is the most important part of the process. Planning ahead enables you to purchase groceries when they are at their lowest prices in the grocery cycle. For example, there are 2 10lb. tubes of hamburger in this tub. They were both on sale at some point in the last couple of months. We stock up on items like taco seasoning, barbecue sauce, pasta, and spaghetti sauce when they are on sale and we try to pair the sale price with coupons from the paper or coupon websites. Planning ahead and stockpiling will prevent you from having to buy a boatload of groceries the weekend of. The first time we did this, we hadn't planned ahead and spent about triple what we usually do for a weeks worth of groceries. That'll kill your budget and it also takes a lot more time!

Katy does the majority (actually all) of the menu planning and I help where I can. And by that I mean I suggest healthful options...like chili dogs. This usually earns me an eye roll and a "Did you even take health class in high school?"
Planning a menu for a week is tough, for a month can be a nightmare. But, it doesn't have to be. Plan on eating most of your meals twice per month. The first time we did our OAMC, we only used a couple of recipes twice and it made it take a looooot longer. Also, you don't need to have every meal in the freezer. Obviously most people eat out once in a while, there are also meals that you don't need to fix ahead. We serve broiled fish once per week, grill a lot throughout the summer months, and we love a good frozen pizza! We'll post our menu for September soon.

Once a Month Cooking

This is it, the weekend is here and we will be doing our once a month cooking (OAMC). This is a fun filled weekend. This initial post is just an invite to our facebook and twitter friends to see the progress of what we are doing and how everything turns out. Then you can decide if this is something that you are willing to venture down. It makes the rest of the month a lot easier to spend a day (or two) cooking up a storm.