Friday, January 14, 2011

"Once A Month Cooking"


Today I woke up early, grabbed both girls and headed to our local grocery store to buy the items needed for my first attempt at "once a month cooking". The day started out great. Moriah was a huge help at the grocery store; we both were sipping our starbucks as we headed down the aisles gathering all our necessary ingredients. After shopping with two very happy and content girls for over an hour , we headed home.

Upon arriving at home and being greeted by two well behaved boys I began browning my meat, cutting my vegetables and getting really excited to begin making a million plus meals. Things were moving very well. The kids were very occupied pulling weeds in the back yard, Hannah was sleeping in her bassinet and I was busying cutting, cutting cutting more onions than I care to remember and peeling carrots. I am proud to announce that at the end of the day I had made Nacho Cheese Soup, Pea soup, Vegetable Lasagna ( most of this is enough for two meals for our family), 21 homemade egg rolls and they are so great!!!, Cinn. Chili, taco meat w/ pinto beans, Potato Soup which is the only thing that messed up as I made it at the end of my marathon left it on too high of a heat setting and scalded the evaporated milk....oh well....and a few other things that I can't remember as well as homemade chocolate chip cookies.

I am over the kitchen, that is an understatement. I still have a bunch of other meals but not the kind that you make so much in advance, ie: black bean burgers. However, the ingredients are on hand and I am able to make them. After you remove our toiletries and extras from my shopping trip . I spent about $140 but I am thinking this should last us for most of the month as far as dinner and breakfast is concerned. I'm hoping lunch too. I was attempting to make Shepherd's pie at the last second but my steam blew out of my engine and I went on a 50 minute power walk that is more closely related to running than walking if any of you have walked with me before. I am happy with my progress today and all that was accomplished. I am not sure , at the end of the day, how I feel about once ea month cooking. I may just continue to try and buy once a month or 1.5x per month and make sure I have a detailed meal list and follow that. However, it was a great experience and I am looking forward to sitting back and enjoying all my pre made , healthy, homemade from scratch meals!

4 comments:

Haley said...

Seriously, I don't know how you do it Amanda. $140 for a whole month's worth of food? How is that possible?! I'd love someone to teach me these things. :)

Haley said...

Seriously, how do you do it Amanda?! $140 for a whole month's worth of food? I'd love for someone to teach me how this is possible. :)

Amanda said...

Hey Haley! It's a lot of work but honestly, I just go through a few cookbooks, write out all the ingredients, make sure that many of the meals have like ingredients, I use 1/2 the amt of meat a recipes calls for that way it lasts longer and make sure we have "meatless Mondays" and a couple of other veg. meals during the week. It really saves on the grocery budget and I'm shopping for 6 ( well I guess Hannah doesnt count yet but Austen eats like a man :) )

Haley said...

I would love if you'd share some of your vegetarian recipes with me... Mike's a HUGE meat eater and feels like we should have meat with every meal, so I'm having a hard time getting him to understand that it's not necessary. If you ever have some free time and want to email me some, I'd appreciate it! hazeymae10@hotmail.com