OAMC

Saturday my g/f and I did our Once A Month Cooking. We've really been slacking doing it lately and boy, do we ever notice it. Every night we'd say to ourselves "hmmm, wonder what I'll have for dinner tonight?", then we'd try and come up with the quickest/easiest thing possible, lol. I have to admit, I'm not one of those people that loves to cook. Once in a while I get into it, but for the most part, I only do it out of love. I do it because I love my husband and children and it blesses my husband to no end! He LOVES eating and he loves my cooking....so I cook. But to be honest, I'd just as soon not. It really isn't an option however, Bob doesn't cook at all and Joey can only make PBJ, cereal, mac and cheese or ramen noodles. The other two are just too young...that leaves only me.

My g/f feels pretty much the same, that's why we do the OAMC, plus it saves a ton of money buying in bulk and not buying more expensive meat at the last minute, or eating out. And, misery loves company LOL ;o) This time Rona's mom joined us, so it was the 3 of us. Mom brought her own chicken and meat, Rona and I bought our stuff, then we split the cost of everything in two. We calculated that it cost us $125/family for three weeks of meals. The other 7-9 days we eat at church 4x/mnth, I'll cook pork chops, a ham, a roast and we'll do breakfast 1 or 2x/mnth for dinner as well. There are also leftovers, eating at other friends houses and the occasional sandwich or mac and cheese.

This is what we made:

11 pans of stuffed manicotti with spaghetti sauce. (2 for dinner that night and 3 each to bring home).
10 1lb. bags of ground beef cooked (5 each, mom made raw hamburg patties with her meat).
15 1lb. bags of cooked/chopped boneless, skinless chicken breast (5 each).
19 bags of 1 doz/ea raw meatballs (6 ea. Rona got the extra one since I have some I made at home already).
17 raw meatloaves (mom got 8 small (2people) loafs, Rona got 6 big loafs and I got 3 small loafs per what we chose for our own families).
6 2 lb. bags of chili (2 each).

For me, that's 24 main meal dishes. Chances are we won't need to make meatballs or meatloaves next month, so we'll probably make hamburg patties for the grill and marinate indiv. chicken breasts also for the grill. We'll still do our ground beef and chicken, there are so many different meals you can do with those things. We'll probably also make spaghetti sauce and maybe more chili. If we find some pork on sale we may buy it and shred it up for pulled pork or barbecued pork sandwiches.

We don't like to mix all our ingredients for meals ahead of time, because that limits you to what you will have. If you leave the beef and chicken plain you can do so much more with it.

It took us 6 hours to do all that, but then we are set for the month pretty much. Time and money saver, can't beat that!