Thursday, February 10, 2011

I'm not crazy.... I'm lazy! (the planning process)

I've decided to start blogging about my journey to "Once A Month" cooking... which is basically taking about 6-8 hours one day and preparing meals for the freezer for the next 20 days (5 meals a week).  I hate getting home from work between 6:30/7:00pm and STARTING the process of dinner... What are we going to have??  Then I have my 2 year old asking for "just a snack mommy thats all I want"... my hubby is starving, and has some tinkering to go in the yard and is running out of daylight hours to get it all done if he waits an hour for dinner to be ready and then eat... the last thing I want to do at 7pm is make a gourmet meal... I've got stuff to do - get my son in the tub and in bed, laundry needs to be done, tidying up around the house - oh yeah, and maybe try to get to bed before midnight!!! 

What do we end up having for dinner?  Kraft Dinner and pork chops, pizza, hot dogs, or I plug in the forbidden.... the deep fryer!!  Last week I said that enough was enough - I needed to do something - some sort of meal planning... SOMETHING...

About a year ago I came across a blog where the gal was going the "Once A Month Cooking" route.. in order to get her family to eat more balanced and healthy meals... She recommended the book "Once A Month Cooking" by Mimi Wilson.  I borrowed it from the library - made some notes and it went in my pile of "to do's" - much like a lot of ideas I find out in blogland...

Last Friday night I remembered I had my notes and a few recipes from this book - so what did I do?  Decided right that instant that I was going to prepare 20 meals first thing Saturday morning....  haha - some people might say - you need to go grocery shopping first...   Did I?  NOPE!  (I'll tell you more about my "grocery" shopping habits in a later post!)

I went downstairs to my deep freezer, and brought up a frozen chicken, and a frozen Moose Roast (It also helps that I had a freezer full of moose meat to work with at my own avail!).  Frozen chicken went into the oven (with the oven timer set to come on at 2am, cook for 4 hours and shut off), and the frozen moose roast went into the slow cooker, with the timer also set to only cook for 3 hours. 

By this time, it is almost midnight - my hubby has come in for the night and was wondering what the heck I was up to!!

So, with the Chicken in the oven, and the roast in the slow cooker - I went to work writing down some recipes and digging through cook books to find at least 8 items that I could prepare with the chicken, and moose.  I also had TONNES of moose burger on hand, so I added that to the list of things I could prepare...

After making my list of "to makes" - I wrote down each ingredient and started making a tally of each ingredient that I would need to make all of these recipes.

Remember - I do not live close to the grocery store - actually about 30 minutes from the closest one - and I was not making a special trip into town to buy one thing I was missing - so if my list called for it, and I didn't have it - I either didn't make that recipe, or found a substitute, or did without!

Tomorrow I'll give you my list of recipes, and the ingredients needed to make them.

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