A Day of Cooking

This week, I decided to take the plunge: a Once-A-Month Cooking(OAMC) day. Jeremy has work for the next three weeks, and his days off are not on the weekend, which means I won't have the car. He's filming 12 hour days, many of them night shoots, so I won't see him much on those days. That means no help for dinner, even if I have to work late.

Last week he worked three days during the week, and the lack of his help had me forgetting to take my lunch with me to work (an extra $4 spend a day on lunch) and arriving home at 8pm only to then think about what to make for dinner (we had some enchilada leftovers, so that worked, but only just). Looking forward to three more weeks of that, and I knew I'd eat away a lot of the money he was making, because I had no time to prep meals.

So I Jeremy him look at the grocery flyers on Wednesday to find out what meats are on sale (Tip #1: use the wednesday flyers to plan your meals, and your weekend shopping trips. You can find them online as well as in your mailbox. The deals usually start Thursday or Friday, and go all week. Sometimes there are additional savings on a particular day, like Saturday, so read all the fine print.) Turns out ground beef, chicken breasts with ribs, whole chickens, and boneless beef bottom were all on sale, as well as mushrooms and bell peppers. Wednesday night I planned out seven dishes I could make in bulk based on that list:
Ginger Beef for the slow cooker (using the beef bottom) - 2 entrees
Cheesy Chilada Bake (using the ground beef) - 4 entrees
Arroz con Pollo (chicken breasts, ribs removed) - 2 entrees
Swimming Rama, a thai curry dish (chicken breasts) - 3 entrees
Berry-Roasted Chicken (whole chickens) - 2 entrees
Thai Red Curry with vegetables (mushrooms and the leftover ingredients from Swimming Rama) - 2 entrees
Tofu Stir Fry - 1 entree
Breakfast Burritos - a whole bunch

For clarification, an entree is feeds 4-6, depending on the meal. Most of the recipes came from my OAMC cookbook: Fix, Freeze, and Feast. You do prep and some cooking, then freeze the meal and do the last bit of cooking the day you want to eat it. Very nice. And all the recipes are for multiple entrees, using warehouse sized meat trays. Arroz con Pollo came from the Dream Dinners cookbook (which I will be checking out of the library soon. I love this company, had no idea they had a cookbook until I searched for my favorite meal from them: Arroz con Pollo.) Ginger Beef was in Fix, Freeze and Feast, but I used a variation of the recipe I found on crockpot.com, and the breakfast burritos were just made, no specific recipe. I'm posting the recipes on my other blog I write with my friends: Cooking Kama Sutras

The night before I did some prep: soaked the black beans, made rice, chopped onions and peppers, and really cleaned the kitchen. In the morning I started the beans right off (So easy! Just a little salt and bay leaf, and in an hour, $2 worth of dried black beans had grown to more than 8 cans worth, and tasted WAY better) and whisked up 2 dozen eggs. Cooked some onions and peppers with the eggs, and got started making burritos. Super easy, and in a flash they were in the fridge, and the utensils were in the bowl of soapy water I had laid out.

Then I cooked the ground beef for the Chilada Bakes, put those together in foil trays and into the freezer, and mixed the marinade for the Berry-Roasted Chicken, poured it over the chicken and threw those in the freezer too. I was rockin! Then lunch, and a break and 'do I really HAVE to got back to working? I've done so much already!!' But there were 15 lbs of chicken to be deboned, and 3 lbs of beef to be prepped.

So I started deboning. I've gotten pretty good at this since for the last month only breasts with ribs have been on sale, but this was awful. The chicken was Foster Farms. Foster Farms doesn't butcher their chickens at all well, or even consistently the same. Each breast I had to stare at to figure out the best way to attack it, and by the end I was doing ok, but if I have a choice, I won't choose Foster Farms again.

Once it was done, half the chicken got cut into pieces and went into the curry, and then other half was layered in the Arroz con Pollo and put in the freezer. While the curry simmered, I browned the beef for the Ginger Beef and then made the Veg. curry. While the two curries cooled (I didn't want to pour hot food into ziploc bags. They get too weak) I toasted the tofu, and then put the veggies and tofu bits in a bag for the Tofu Stir Fry (I didn't freeze this one...decided to have it for dinner last night.)

The last bit was the udon noodles for the Ginger Beef. These noodles are intense! (At least as far as noodles go) You have to boil them, then cool them with a cup of water, then boil them and cool them again, then boil them and let them sit for 5 minutes. No wonder they always come precooked (and triple the price.)

At the end of the day, I didn't have a whole lot more dishes than any other big cooking day, as I used the same ones over and over, simply rinsed or wiped clean (as long as they had no raw meat in them, of course.) And cooking on Sat meant I had all Sunday to clean up, which took maybe 30 minutes. Now I have a freezer full of food, a clean kitchen, and a whole new skill set!

I'm thinking about making some marinades next weekend so that if we want something else, we can just pick up meat and go.

It took a fair bit of planning everything out, and knowing what cook when, but when it came down to it, It was pretty simple. I printed out an inventory to put on our fridge that also has the directions for cooking the meals, so as we eat them, we can keep track of what's left, and the cooking directions are never far away.

For those who think they need it, I totally recommend Once a Month Cooking. In the future, I'll hopefully be doing some of it with my friends, a OAMC party. :D