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Monday, August 17, 2009
Once A Month Cooking
Johnathan and I love eating good food, this is something that we can both agree on. We even like cooking, sometimes. Unfortunately, our interest in cooking tends to have dropped significantly since we moved into this apartment. I blame most of it on the space: this kitchen is less than half the size of the kitchen at our old apartment. It’s a shame, too, because it’s one of the only things we really dislike about this place. Since we moved in last September, despite the good intentions to eat better and get back in shape, we’ve found ourselves eating out more than we should and spending a lot of money on overpriced food with too many fatty ingredients and far too much salt.
I was looking for some new recipes to make, some with less fat and more complex carbohydrates instead of simple ones. I ran across the idea in my searches for once a month cooking. It seemed like an intriguing idea to me. We already do our shopping twice a month, but what if we did it only once a month and froze a lot of things to thaw and eat later? Interesting concept! The idea was that we’d have something at home to eat, even when were decidedly uninterested in cooking. Well, I picked out some recipes – mostly healthy ones, and very few which said anything about the freezability of the recipe – and made up a grocery list. We went shopping on the thirteenth of July for all of the ingredients for about twenty recipes, and commenced with the cooking the following weekend. The cooking went fairly well. I discovered that cooking and freezing up a few recipes on my own is a tall order, particularly as it leaves me less time to clean up after myself unless I literally want to be in the kitchen all day. However, when Johnathan and I did a bunch of cooking together things ran smoothly. One of us could clean up or do prep work while the other checked on recipe instructions or tended to something that was already in progress. We managed to use up nearly everything in our freezer with the exception of the frozen vegetables and fill it until it was absolutely packed 100% full. There was no more room in that sucker when we were done!
Now that we’ve done it once and experienced what it was like to do the work and reap the benefits, we’re going to go again this month, this time with some new knowledge. Some things we learned:
- Stuffed peppers do not freeze very well.
- White lasagna that includes a pesto sauce is pretty good but the whole thing gets oily if not baked right away because the pesto separates.
- The only way this actually works is if someone actually remembers to get something out of the freezer. Trying to quickly thaw things is a pain.
- Chilis, soups and stews freeze very well!
- Recipes that include just regular ingredients are more likely to be pleasing than those that require ingredients that we don’t even know how to find. (In other words, keep it simple, stupid!)
Overall, we’re both really happy about the whole experience. We’ve got a list of recipes already picked out to make for next month, and I expect we’ll go shopping for that pretty soon and use our experiences to our advantage. We’re making a bigger variety of meals and recipes with simpler ingredients – ones we’ve purchased before and know how to locate in the various stores. I expect we’ll come in under budget this time around, and hopefully be able to pack up our freezer just as much as last time.
I’m so glad we thought to try this. It has saved us so much time and frustration, not to mention a ton of money that was previously spent on eating out becuase we were too lazy to cook!
Now, if only we could get our hands on a bigger freezer so that we could have more storage.
With little counter space, we got creative with where we, er, stored things.
A dozen cupcakes, some thawing chicken, and a card table that's only kind of holding up the microwave.
We mentioned there's not much counter space, right? This is where the laptop lived so that we could access online recipes.
Cookin' some chicken. I have no idea which recipe this was for.
Produce storage overflow. (Note the bottle of vodka: that was for after.)
It was a long weekend, but the payoff is obvious.
Packed full. There was quite literally no more room in there.
The fridge remained pretty full throughout.
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We have a small chest freezer (I believe it’s a 5.0 cubic feet), and it’s the best thing we ever have received. It was about $220 (just to give you the rough estimate of cost), and it only increased our electric bill by maybe $6/month to run it. I have the mindset to something similar to you for the winter time, when we’re less likely to cook anything. However, I once stored 4 turkeys, ice, and lots of other things in there before I actually came close to running out of room.
I can’t give exact dimensions, but it’s smallish and fits well in our smallish kitchen/dining room. Now we use the freezer part of our refrigerator to put ice, and other small things in.
I think it’s been well worth it to have. 
Dani — August 22, 2009 @ 10:55 pm
This is such an inspired idea!! I love the concept. Unfortunately I don’t think it would work quite so well for a family of four
I forget how much less food you need for only two people…
Keep it up!! And enjoy the money saved (not to mention the healthier diet)
kreachr — September 8, 2009 @ 9:06 pm
@kreachr I think it could work for a family of four if you cooked the right things. For instance, this month, I cooked five quarts of chili in about an hour. That fed us for about seven meals, so that would be eight meals if you had kids (versus teenagers who would be likely to eat adult portions). A lasagna would probably make one meal with leftovers. I try to make sure whatever we cook has enough leftovers for at least lunch for both of us for the following day. It could work, depending on what you chose to cook!
It wouldn’t be as cheap as it was for us, but you’d be cooking for twice as many. 
Laura — September 8, 2009 @ 9:12 pm
Laura –
I was wondering.. when you are preparing your meals and such – Do you use regular plastic/glass containers, or do you use the aluminum throw away ones? I’m tossing around the idea of doing the meals like you and John do, since school and work is not very conducive to cooking regularly. I am looking more at the aspect of I’d like to be able to go from freezer->fridge to thaw -> oven to cook. It just would require more containers than I currently had.
Dani — September 12, 2009 @ 12:52 am
When we’re cooking, we try to use our good cookware that we got from my mom as a wedding present. (Emeril ware or somethng like that. It’s been very good to us.) We bought a bunch of rubbermaid containers when we were starting, and those come in a lot of sizes. We have three glass casserole dishes that we use for things like lasagna (two 13×9 and one 8×8 or 9×9, I’m not sure which.)
We do go from freezer to fridge (or counter sometimes for a while, because damn, some of these things just will not thaw in the fridge), and it has worked very well. Sometimes we skip the oven or the stove and just heat up individual servings in the microwave when things are already cooked. The lasagna that we froze and the chicken pot pie will be cooked after we thaw them.
I guess the short of it is:
- Rubbermaid containers, lots of them
- Glass casserole dishes
We don’t use throwaway ones, and I wouldn’t anyway because that’s pretty wasteful and will end up costing more in the long run. We got a couple of boxes of containers for about $20 each at target. It came with a lot of little once which we don’t use as much, but they stack up really well and they don’t take up as much space because of that. Those are useful for storing individual servings of soups, or I’m using one for a powdered cream of chicken soup mix that I made.
Laura — September 12, 2009 @ 4:27 am
Ok, that’s what I kind of figured. Glad used to make something called OvenWare. It was like storage containers, but they were safe for the oven (except for the lids). I wonder if it still exists. I found some in Mom’s basement but she bought hers ages ago.
Dani — September 19, 2009 @ 11:29 am