In my previous post I mentioned our two-week cook.

A while ago I was visiting a friend and his wife was in the kitchen making pancakes. I made a comment that pancakes for dinner would be fun but he said that she was doing their once-a-month cook which included blueberry pancakes from scratch.

Intrigued, I went online and looked up more information. Basically you plan your meals for one month, pick a day to prepare those meals, and cook your heart out. You freeze the meals and pull out a different dish before bed each night. You reheat the food for dinner and prepare a side (salads are best for time and health purposes!).

You can do a search for “month long cooking” or “once a month cooking” to get more information on how to plan and suggested recipes for food that freezes well.

Our house is small and we don’t have room to store a month’s worth of meals so we do a two-week cook and that happened to be today. So, from 2:30pm to 9:00pm I was in the kitchen (this included time to eat dinner and do dishes).

As a result of the time in the kitchen, we now have:

• Taco Lime Chicken (BBQ)
• Chicken Vindaloo (stovetop)
• Zesty Burgers (BBQ) 2 nights
• Baked Spaghetti (stovetop to oven) 2 nights
• Chili (crock pot) 2 nights
• Asparagus Soup (stovetop)
• Mushroom Porkchops (stovetop)
• Taco Meat (stovetop) 2 nights

I also precooked 2 lbs of bacon (for BLTs) and a package of sausages. While I cleaned up, I decided to can some vegetables and now have 5 jars of pickled asparagus, carrots, and cucumbers.

Depending on what we put on our menu, we also make use of our George Foreman grill. The kitchen is a disaster but it’s only for one day. You can cook alone, but having someone to help will cut your time down by quite a bit.

The cook saves us time, saves us money and we rarely go out to eat. When we get home from work we don’t have to think about what’s for dinner and we can plate everything in about 10 minutes. Since we make most of our sauces and marinades from scratch during the process, we’ve also lost weight; what a great side effect!

Victoria Rose dinner ideas, month long cooking