We survived!
If you remember on Friday I was tackling a WHOLE day of cooking. Today I am going to explain how it worked out, and answer all the questions I got about it!
So after reading the amazing, Once a Month Mom website I knew I had to try this out. I picked the August Traditional Menu. I inputted 4 people into the grocery lists and recipe cards and printed out all the material for this process. I read all the instructions and recipes and then hit the grocery store with the huge grocery list.
I spent $300 on groceries for this menu. Not bad, considering the AMOUNT of meat I had to buy. Which was disturbing for this girl who has been trying to not eat as much meat. I couldn't afford to buy it all free from, so I compromised and bought one of each meats free from (there was 4 packs of 5 chicken breasts, 3 packs of ground beef, 4 packs of 2 pork chops and a huge pack of 5 steaks and bacon and pepperoni!!!)
I also needed 3 dozen eggs and sucked it up and bought them free range. I learnt a lot at the Stampede about the differences in egg types and I can ONLY buy free range, not even free run anymore. And I pay $6-8 a dozen for them! ICK.
So if you do this, you can save money buying on sale meats and cheaper eggs, so it could be a lot less then $300.
The night before the big cooking day I prepped all the veggies, like the instructions tell you too. I cut sooo many veggies, browned a lot of ground beef and sauteed mushrooms.
The day of I started cooking at 7:30am. I finished at 5:30pm. No breaks, other then to deal with the kids.


2 kinds of muffins, one to eat while cooking, one to cook and then freeze. I followed the instructions exactly, because I like instructions and they were written so well. But you can do this type of cooking how ever you want. But the instructions use your oven the most efficient way by cooking the lower temp things first and higher temp things later.







So while something was cooking, I was preparing the next recipe. Then one would come out of the oven and cool, while the next one went in and then a new recipe was prepared. I also had to flash freeze things, lay them on cookie trays in a single layer and freeze them before packing, and package things!
It didn't take long till I was behind a whole recipe in the instructions.
I also would fill the kitchen sink with water at the beginning of each recipe, use the water throughout cooking, then wash all the dishes from that recipe and counters at the end of cooking it. I like a clean work space. This amount of cleaning also helped in putting me a recipe behind.
What ended up happening was the oven was on for a while cooking nothing, because I hadn't prepared the next recipe by the time the cooking one had to come out!



I have big counters and I soon found that they were all full, the table was being used to cool food and I had no space left! AND a big glob of dough to roll out, so in came the floor.

I made this all work by having the instructions taped to the bottom of my kitchen cupboards. Then I taped up each recipe and left it taped up until the recipe was packaged and frozen. I had 10 recipes on the cupboards at one point!
The kitchen table was my packaging centre. I had the labels ONce a Month Mom provides and taped them to the gallon or quart freezer bags. The labels tell you what is in the bag and how to prepare it when your ready to cook it.
As the recipes went on there was less oven cooking, more stove top, then it was no cooking at all, just putting the meat in bags and adding marinades or sauces or both to the bags.
I would say half the recipes have some cooked meat and the other half has raw, now frozen, meat. Which cut down a lot on the cooking time that day.


I was worried the recipes would be basic and simple to make the cooking day faster, but they were full of amazing ingredients and every sauce tasted awesome! I was really pleased with the whole set up.
There was only 2 recipes I ended up not making, the pepperoni grilled cheese sandwiches sounded great, but grilled cheese is an easy go to lunch for us, so them taking up precious freezer space didn't seem wise. I also tried to make the raspberry roll ups, they are pancakes spread with cream cheese and raspberry sauce, but the pancake batter they had me make was way to thick for this! It should have been a crepe batter instead. So I just froze the pancake batter for later and put some into the fridge to use that weekend. The sauce I froze into ice cub trays to pop out as a single portion sauce for pancakes.
What I ended up with,
2 Bubble Up Pizzas
15 egg burritos
12 taco bits (wonton wrappers filled with beef and yummness)
16 lemon raspberry muffins
1 huge container of tomato bisque
1 gallon bag of tomato bisque
8 large rattle snack rolls (croissants filled with beef, veggies and sauce)
12 raspberry cubes
1 gallon bag of pancake batter
1 gallon bag of meatballs and homemade bar b q sauce
2 gallon bags of crockpot mongolian beef
2 gallon bags of chicken cacciatore
2 gallon bags orange teriyaki pork
2 gallon bags Dijon baked chicken
2 gallon bags yogurt marinade chicken
6 spinach and goat cheese stuffed chicken breasts, wrapped in bacon
AWESOME!



And it all fit in my fridges freezer!
It all needs to thaw before cooking. I learnt that the best way to thaw something is in your fridge, then you can put it in the oven, bar b q or grill once thawed. And if you decide not to use it you can put it back in your freezer! Most of these things will take 2 days to thaw, so weeks still have to be planned.

So I made up this board. It says what we plan on eating that week and what day each things needs to come out of the freezer to thaw in the fridge.
It is also important to keep track of what is in your freezer, because it is sooo full digging through it to find out what I have in there would be crazy.

Freezer inventory sheet, right on the fridge for easy access.
Now the real test begins. Cooking all this food was, hard, but really rewarding actually. I am soo happy with the quality of food in the freezer. But if it doesn't taste good, then there is no point in all of this.
I have had 2 items now, some taco bits (AWESOME, the kids devoured them) and last night we had one of the crock pot Mongolian beefs, ummm wow. Keith could not stop saying, this is so good, this is so good! It was really amazing.
I am impressed so far. I have a feeling this will become a monthly thing for us. Next time I might try the vegetarian menu, as this was A LOT of meat!
Ohh how did the kids do? They were unsupervised basically all day. The TV never turned off. But they were fantastic. Moving the table down there and setting up those simple craft trays were such a great ideas, because they played on them all day long.

That's one played in room! Worth it though.
Things for next time, wearing shoes! AHH my feet were sore, standing for 10 hours takes its toll.
Happy :)
TODAY: I don't have to go grocery shopping! CRAZY, I grocery shop every Monday....this is weird. I might just go to get yogurt and a few baking items I ran out of, just because it's Monday, it's what I do. A friend is hopefully visiting today too. We are eating burritos tonight!