Weekly Cooking – Take 1

Tonight after the kids went to bed, I finally got to try bulk cooking.  I cooked for a weeks worth of meals.
I started at 7:30 pm and was done with four meals by 10:00pm (I have 1 meal left to complete, which will be done tomorrow.)  Clean up took another 15 minutes.  My first impression is that 2 1/2 hours of cooking in one night is well worth it to free up the next week in the evenings.
Here are some tips I’ve learned on my first try.

• Prep work is the key to the success of bulk cooking.
• Shop for your ingredients on a day prior to your cooking day.
• Pick up some freezer bags – you can put some items in these, lay flat to freeze then stack after frozen
• If you don’t want to tie up all your casserole dishes in the freezer stop by your local discount store and pick up a variety of sizes of foil containers.
• Have plenty of plastic wrap and tinfoil on hand – it will help you freezer proof your items in the tinfoil containers.
• As you have down time while cooking one recipe start prepping for the next one and/or tidy up
• Use as many items that can go in the dishwasher as possible- it will help reduce clean-up time
• Reuse pans when possible- When browning meat or cooking chicken. I rinsed the pan with soap and water and used it for the next recipe.

My favorite place to go and look for the foil pans, tinfoil, plastic wrap and freezer bags is the Dollar Tree.

As I was looking at the meals, I realized that it was more like 2 weeks worth of meals, since my boys aren’t big eaters yet.  However, they won’t want to eat the exact same meals two weeks in a row, so I’ll be searching for a few more meals to round out the next couple weeks meals.

Tags: bulk, Cooking, monthly, weekly