The Frozen Assets Experiment

I'm always on the lookout for a way to do things better when it comes to homemaking. This weekend it was "how to be in the kitchen less often", though I spent the whole weekend IN said kitchen to make it work.

During my quest to either
a. convince Eric to expand our grocery budget
OR
b. figure out how to spend less on groceries
I once again ran across the once-a-month-cooking phenom and decided to give it another whirl. It's been about 4 years since the last time I did it...and that time was with a friend so I didn't have as much flexibility for recipe selection etc. Frozen Assets Lite and Easy by Deborah Taylor-Hough was available at the library so that's the cookbook I used.

The book is broke down into mini-sessions with 4-6 recipes each. I chose one chicken, the ground beef and a pasta mini-session to make up a total of fourteen main dishes. I combined the grocery lists into one master and hit the stores this week...once on Tuesday to catch some sales and again on Friday to get the weekend specials and produce.

Now, because I don't keep my kitchen in "ready-to-cook" mode at all times, I ended up spending over an hour Saturday morning just rearranging the table & island, washing pots and pans and unloading the dishwasher. Once I had a clean slate though, bam! there was some major cooking going on. Not really. It was more like lots of chopping, grating, running to a quick garage sale, more chopping, boiling chickens, thawing meat etc. Not to mention keeping three little ones occupied. I grated my thumb, which was special too!

By late Saturday night I had finished the pasta and all but one of the beef recipes and had the kitchen cleaned and ready to go again today. I got another meal in the freezer before church and now, at 7:23 p.m., just need to bag some soup that is cooling and mix up the last recipe which is pretty easy.

My piggies are tired, I'm a little grouchy and I have a deep slice on one finger from some heavy-duty foil. Ouch! BUT--I have (okay, almost have) 14 meals ready to thaw, heat and eat in my freezer!!! Some of the meals are so large that I'm sure they'll stretch to two full meals while others should yield some leftovers. Woot! Woot!

I think from now on I'll just do one mini-session at a time. Or else adapt some of my own recipes and do the cook more than one at a time deal. One thing I really liked about using the recipes from Frozen Assets was that they all contained a lot of veggies...something I know I need to use more of in my cooking. The kids will probably balk at some of the meals (beans! aaack! zucchini ugh!) but it will do them good! And guess who isn't going to be cooking for the next several weeks....me!!!!!!!