Once-a-Month Meals
I recently found a website called Once a Month Meals (OaMM). The idea behind it is that they have many MANY recipes that you can prep ahead of time and freeze for later. You can create a menu plan, add up to 15 recipes from their site to your menu plan, and then tell the system how many servings you want each meal to be and how many make-ahead meals of each recipe you want, and it guides you through it.
Yesterday was my first attempt at this. I picked 15 meals that looked/sounded like they'd be really good. I made my shopping list (they allow you to download an exact shopping list, but I wanted to write it out to combine a few things, like there would be an entry for Chicken breast and another for chicken thighs, but I only eat breast, another entry was for diced tomatoes and one for diced tomatoes with chilis that I combined together). And when I got home from the store, I started in.
As I understood it, the basic steps for doing a meal plan session are to
Make your meal plan from the available recipes
Print out a shopping list (the website creates this)
Shop for the items on the list
Print out the prep-day sheet
Make all the recipes
Freeze
My experience of last night's endeavor was that it sucked. Hard. The recipes were good and the prep wasn't really that bad, but there are some things I could have done differently that would have made a huge difference.
I learned a lot in my first go-round. Some things I realized part-way through, some I realized once I was cleaning up my disaster of a kitchen at the end.
My tips for my next round will be:
PAY ATTENTION TO PREP TIMES ON THE RECIPE CARDS
Make my meal plan
Shop at a warehouse grocery store like Sam's, Costco, or BJ's because bulk, man
Pre-prepare my cooking by figuring out how much hamburger meat I need to have "cooked" for a recipe, chopped onions, etc. Do all that the night before
Use these little cups to measure out my spices for all recipes beforehand
Figure out what I'm going to eat for the next 2 or 3 days to keep in the fridge instead of freezing.
Make up my Ziploc bags and bowls with their labels
Group similar recipes together (like my Santa-Fe chicken and my taco pasta) because I can reuse some of those mixing bowls without having to wash and dry them in between when a rinse would do just fine
WEAR MY GOOD SNEAKERS FOR ARCH SUPPORT because I didn't last night, and my feet were dead weight about 5 recipes in
Download an audiobook to listen to while I'm prepping. Or a podcast. Or something.
Make sure I do my flash-freeze recipes in a logical order. Somehow, all my flash-freeze ones were near the end. Since I needed freezer room to store the pans before packaging the item, I couldn't do them in succession. Honestly, I'll probably ensure I only do 2 or 3 flash-freeze recipes per prep day, and do one at the start, one in the middle, and one at the end. Or just start and end.
Make an "eat" calendar. I will make a little post-it note and pre-write each individual meal on one note, then add it to my calendar (so I can move them around if I want to). I could also use calendar software to do this, but I like the tactile feeling of placing and moving stickies. I'm a very techy person but this is one thing I do like doing with paper.
Get 11 inches-wide plastic storage bins. I can freeze all my bags lying down, flat, and then put them into these storage bins in order of when I'm going to eat them
