How to cook once and eat for a whole month!

There’s a lot of sites out there that talk about freezer cooking and offer recipes, but not many that actually break down HOW to actually get started planning a month of pre-cooked meals. I’m going into my fifth straight month of Freezer Cooking, so I thought now is a good time to make a post.

Hopefully this can help the absolute beginner. I’m saving a ton of time and money doing my dinners this way. I’m feeding four people including a teenage boy, and the quality of the meals we’re eating is much higher than it used to be before I started this method. We used to spend over $400 on just dinners alone and we were eating a lot of chicken nuggets, sloppy joes, rotisserie chickens, and McDonalds.That isn’t even to mention the time saved- I spent an enormous amount of time thinking about eating, planning what we’ll be eating, shopping for food, cooking the food, and cleaning up after all that.

Compare that with last month, I spent half that and we had coconut curry chicken with squash, black bean turkey chili, beef and vegetable soup, ranch pork chops with potatoes, teriyaki chicken with rice, and cranberry pork roast.

Onto the steps!

Step Zero: Understand that you’ll be repeating meals by days of the week. Like meatloaf on mondays, tacos on tuesdays, etc. Convince/warn your family.

Step One: Sit down and look at a calendar. Work out which days you’re cooking and how many people you’re cooking for. How many of each day will you be making dinners for? Maybe there’s four Saturdays this month, but one of them is a birthday and you’ll eat out and wont need to cook, or whatever.

Step Two: Decide which days of the week you’ll need a crockpot meal, which days you’ll be okay with doing a few extra prep steps, and which days you’ll have time to bake a meal from frozen in the oven. i.e. (crockpot meal on those busy Mondays? Oven meal with extra steps on Sundays?) You don’t want to be fooling around with needing to add a can of coconut milk to the crockpot after three hours have elapsed if you won’t be at home for most of the day.

Step Three: Decide on your meats. Maybe you want to have a pork-based dinner one night, a beef-based dinner two nights, a meatless night, a fish/seafood dinner one night, and two chicken-based dinners. Or whatever configuration works for you.

Step Four: Now you should have a list of each week day with Number of days, cooking style, extra steps, and meat type.

So now all you need to do is find a recipe for each day of the week that meets your criteria and multiply it to fit the number of days you need. Google can help immensely with this if you include the terms “Freezer cooking” or “once a month cooking” or “OAMC” with your search.

Print off the recipes you chose and work through them to create your shopping list, being careful to multiply by the number of times you’ll need to make the recipe. Hopefully, you’re repeating meats enough that you can buy your meat products in bulk and that will help save you some money.If you have access to Sam’s Club, absolutely buy your meats there. You can get like half a pig for $20 (although you’ll have to play butcher on it yourself.)

Don’t be afraid to go to different stores to get better prices. You’ll be buying a lot of each ingredient, so, saving a couple bucks here and there can really add up. I usually go to Sam’s for my meat, Aldi for everything else. And usually a quick stop at Walmart for the more obscure things that Aldi didn’t carry (like one of my recipes last month called for coconut milk, and Aldi just doesn’t carry it.)

I save a ton of money doing it this way– I went through one day when I had a few hours without the kids and took a blank spreadsheet to Aldi, Walmart, and the closest grocery store to my home which is Ingles. By buying mainly at Aldi (and my meat at Sam’s) I saved over $90 over the prices at Ingles, and $20 over the prices at Walmart.

I did this mainly out of curiosity and to be absolutely honest with you, I did it for bragging rights a little bit as my husband thinks I’m silly to use gas driving around buying at different stores. I think the $90 saved can buy an awful lot of gas, hahaha.

Preparing for a day of cooking. It does take one whole day to cook 24 meals.