Really? Cook once a month? How is that even possible?
That’s what I wondered when I stumbled across a website dedicated to creating monthly meals for your family using seasonal recipes and ingredients.
What is Freezer Cooking?
Freezer Cooking (also called once a month cooking (OAMC), bulk cooking, and power cooking) is an assembly-line cooking method that allows you to fill your freezer with a month’s worth of home-cooked dinner entrees. In a single day, you prepare, cook, and assemble 30 entrees for the freezer.
Why Freezer Cook?
Freezer cooking offers convenience, time and money savings, and nutrition. In exchange for one day’s worth of work, you save a month’s worth of time and money. No more coming up with last minute ideas for dinner. No more last minute stops to pick up something at the grocery store or swinging through the fast food joint down the street.
Once a month, you’re bulk buying items you need, which saves money and sharply lowers  the price-per serving of each meal. And because you aren’t making extra trips to the grocery store for dinners, impulse buying goes away.
Preparing the food in assembly-line fashion – chopping ten onions at once, browning ground beef for chili, spaghetti sauce and taco mix in one pan – cuts preparation time for each entree and cuts down on the mess.
And as for convenience, every morning you simply remove the evening’s entree for reheating at dinnertime. No thought, no fuss, no mess, no WORK!
Isn’t It A Lot of Work?
Yes, it absolutely requires planning and effort. Finding an entire day to do nothing but cook is not easy, I understand. Have the husband take the kids for the day for some bonding time, the benefits of freezer cooking seems to outweigh the work involved.
And if you think about it, many of us already do some form of freezer cooking on a smaller scale. Maybe you cook a roast for Sunday’s dinner, and then thin-slice the leftovers for a Tuesday night French Dip meal. And you double Sunday night’s mashed potatoes to use to make potato pancakes later in the week, or to top off a meatloaf on Thursday. It’s not harder to make a triple batch of your homemade spaghetti sauce than it is to make a single batch. We just need to learn to think of doing it on a bigger scale.
Freezer cooking also promotes efficiency and eliminates waste. Your meals are labeled, wrapped, and bundled with items needed to complete the meal. The only thing that you need to remember to do is to take it out of the freezer and re-heat it!
Now what I love about the once a month mom site is that her menu plans don’t just come in traditional form; she has plans for whole foods, gluten and dairy free, diet, vegetarian, and even for baby food!
You can look up recipes by menu type, ingredient, meal type, or even by how you plan to cook it (slow cooker, baked, no cook, grill, etc).
She includes resources like grocery lists, instructions, labels, tips and more.
This is all very new to me, but I think I might give it a shot! Do you freezer cook? Would you be willing to try it out after seeing all of the benefits that come with it?
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