Are you too busy to cook and get stuck in a rut when it comes to meal planning? A very practical solution to this dilemma is once a month cooking or OAMC. Take one or two days and just cook up a storm, and fill your freezer with all the meals you’ll need for the next month. Clean up will be minimal too, and the time you save cooking and cleaning can be better spent with your family or doing something else you enjoy.

Once a month cooking works well for singles, couples, and small or large families. Food items needed to prepare the meals can be purchased in bulk or when they are on sale, which will greatly reduce the monthly grocery bill too. No one could complain about that! I don’t know about you, but I am somewhat disturbed when I walk out of the grocery store with one small bag of groceries that cost $25 or more!

To get started you will want to sit down and pick out meals that you or your family won’t get tired of during the next month. Make the shopping list based on enough ingredients for at least twenty-four meals, depending on how often you eat out, and don’t forget extra freezer bags, aluminum foil pans, or other storage containers. Being organized will help you out tremendously!

Online once a month cooking sites recommend that once you have chosen the meals you want to prepare, look at all the ingredients needed and add up what you’ll need. You want to make sure your shopping list is accurate, because you don’t want to spend time running to the grocery store when you should be cooking! For recipes that can’t be completely assembled ahead of time, like Sloppy Joes, make sure buns are on the list and frozen separately with the meat mixture so that everything is on hand when you need it.

If you’re interested in simplifying your life and once a month cooking, visit any number of online sites for recipe ideas, storage tips, and more. Busy people don’t want to spend time in the kitchen cooking when they could be doing something else. Once a month cooking is the answer; it saves time, money, and your sanity. Meal planning can become monotonous and a chore, which is why it is so much easier with once a month cooking. Take two or three days to simplify your life and the lives of your family members, and enjoy the rest of the month!

The phrase “what’s for dinner” is one off the biggest road blocks to getting dinner on the
table in time. On most days, the average cook still doesn’t know what is for dinner by 4 p.m.  After a long frustrating day, dinner usually comes from one of three ideas:

*Preparing an old favorite, one of a few dishes that you serve all the time

*Stopping on the way home for fast food

*Fighting your way through the super market after work (we all know how much fun that is)

There is an easier way to plan your meals!  Visualize the five nights of the week as slots that need to be filled with a menu. If your family likes a wide variety in their menus, your weekly menu could include fish, chicken, pork, beef and some kind of meatless casserole. If they like chicken better than anything else, have chicken two nights in the week. A desk calendar or any calendar that has room to write works great for meal planning.

Sit down and write in the main dish for each of those slots.  If there is something your family really likes, plan on cooking a double batch and freezing half of it for those hectic days. After you have entered your main dish, go back and enter your bread, vegetable, salad and desert. It really makes it easier to plan your shopping list when meal planning this way.

Here’s another advantage to the calendar pages if you and your family have busy after school and work schedules:  plan your meals around those activities by writing them on the same calendar.

When planning your meals, assume dinner groundwork will take between 15 and 45 minutes.While this may not seem like it, in the end this simple process can be a real time saver, in addition to eliminating the stress of not knowing what to cook.

If you are looking for a real challenge, go from cooking for a family of six, to cooking for two, the kids are off to college, or have their own families. However, you still find yourself with enough leftovers for an army!  What do you do? Well, you reduce your portions and make smaller amounts of food.

Cooking for two is also a great weight loss help, because now you have no extra food, only extra portions. The place to start for this is in the market, choose foods that are easy to divide or come in sizes that are made for one or two. Chops, chicken pieces, steaks, sausage, hamburger and fish fillets are a good place to start.

If you miss the old standby roast, get the smallest one you can, then if it is still too big, divide it into two pieces and freeze one for later use. Leftover roast is great in soups
and stews too, and again it eliminates leftovers.

It is easy to buy fresh fruits and veggies by the piece, except in the case of broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and even lettuce. There are ways around this: Buy broccoli and cauliflower in stir fry packages, you can take out whichever one you want and save the rest for later.

Lettuce comes in packages prepared for salads now, and shredded cabbage for cole-slaw is great for corned beef and cabbage.  Whenever you can, buy the smaller packages, as cooking for two does not require large quantities. However, this isn’t always the best way to go if you are on a budget.

Cooking for two requires a great deal more planning ahead; for instance, plan to use extra canned vegetables in a soup or stew.  Once again, most vegetables are available frozen, in which case you can remove the amount you need and leave the rest frozen.

Creativity and advanced planning are the main requirements for cooking for two. It requires smaller portions, but you will find it extremely cost effective when you finally get it down to a fine art.