Almost every morning on the way to preschool, my daughter asks, “What’s for dinner?” I think she’s picked it up from her father, who asks the same question the moment he wakes up every afternoon (he works nights).
More often than not, I don’t have an answer for them.
You’d think – or, at least, I would – that planning meals would be easier now that I’m home. But somehow, I’ve found it more difficult to decide what we’re eating on a daily basis and find myself scrambling in the evening to throw something together.
My one saving grace in this mess is pulling something out of the freezer that just needs to be nuked thawed out before putting it on the table. Every few weeks, I pull several pounds of hamburger out of our freezer and brown it. Then I divvy it up and put it back in the freezer. If I’m really on my game, I’ll do up a few pounds of chicken at the same time and chop some veggies to freeze, too.
I can only imagine how much simpler my life would be if I’d cook actual MEALS in advance! I don’t really have to imagine, though. I can just ask my friend, Tricia, owner of and mastermind behind Once a Month Mom, a blog that helps you fill your freezer by creating monthly menus using seasonal recipes. For free.
Did you get that part? Every month, Tricia provides a menu, instructions, labels and (of course) recipes for filling your freezer for the next several weeks, and it costs you nothing!
As a matter of fact, you can get the traditional (family-friendly) menu or the diet (lighter, healthier) menu for the month of April right now. (She also has several baby menus available.) And starting next month, you’ll also be able to get a gluten-free and dairy-free menu and a whole foods menu. (And a vegetarian menu is coming up in June!)
Tricia has also just redesigned her site to make it more user-friendly and awesome. (Okay, so she didn’t use the word “awesome.” She used more techy words, because she’s smart like that. But me? I just call it awesome.)
Once a Month Mom is an amazing resource for anyone who doesn’t want to struggle with that inevitable question: “What’s for dinner?” And I’m happy to say OAMM is my featured sponsor for the month. Go check it out!
Have you ever done once a month cooking or freezer cooking? How do you get organized?
Note: I am accepting sponsors for the second quarter of this year. Sponsors can commit for one month or three. My prices are reasonable, and I throw in fun things like include you in my #FollowFriday tweets and sponsor spotlight posts like this! Interested? Contact me for more information.
I’ve never done it, only because I feel like I don’t have the freezer space for it. Maybe I will look into it more since I promised my husband I would cook every night as a way to save money now that I’m not working outside the home.
I know I’ve read a blog post about doing once-a-month cooking with little freezer space. I can’t remember where it was, though. Just doing meat doesn’t take as much room, and for me, it makes a huge difference!
Oh yes, I did this for years with one of my good friends who has three boys. When the kids were little we would do the grocery shopping on a Friday (we’d each take a section of the shopping list) and then on a Saturday (when the husbands could watch the kids) we’d cook . . . all day. It was SO exhausting, but SO worth it. I loved doing that with my friend, and I especially loved having meals in my freezer for a month.
Organization? Well, we would usually sit down together before our big cooking day and decide on a bunch of recipes that our families would like and that would freeze well. We started out using the “Once a Month Cooking” book, but we didn’t really like many of the recipes, so we just started using our own. With a little thinking ahead and planning, this can be done. And it’s fun!
Oh, that sounds like such a good system! I’ve tried to start something like this with friends but it hasn’t worked out yet.
I LOVE Tricia and her amazing recipes. I CAN’T WAIT until I have my garage freezer so that I can seriously do this better.
And, if you lived closer to me, we would so do this together.
What a great idea – going to check it out now!
I would really LOVE to try this and find the Once a Month concept fabulous, but I have zero friends around here to do this with. So instead I resort to just doubling recipes and freezing them as I make them, so I have some variety to choose from when I get up in the morning and yet again have no idea what I’m making for dinner. :)
This is SO COOL!! I am on my way over to her site right now :)