Tomorrow I will be cooking a month’s worth of food and freezing it. Pray for me.

Once a Month Cooking

This will be the third time I have done this type of bulk-mega-cooking.

The first time, I did it with a friend who also had a little baby. Gabriel wasn’t even crawling back then, so we had two little non-mobile babies keeping us company.

The second time, I did it with another friend who also had a little baby. I think Gabriel was learning to crawl at this point.

This time, I am doing it by myself and my husband has Gabriel duty because cooking one meal with him can me difficult, let alone 15 recipes.

Holy cow. Will I get out alive?

I am using the most awesome woman’s blog to do this. Her name is Tricia and here is her website.

On her website, Once a Month Meals, she creates the menu, the grocery list, and the instructions for me.

She builds the menu around in-season/on sale items so that it is less expensive.

I heart Tricia.

The Plan

During Gabriel’s nap on Thursday I printed everything out from OAMM’s site, looked at the ads to see where the best deals were, printed coupons, and made a plan.
Friday (yesterday) I went shopping.
So far I have shopped at New Leaf Market, Publix, Winn-Dixie and today (Saturday) I will be finishing my grocery list up at Walmart.
Tomorrow (Sunday) is my big cooking day. I’m getting excited!

Here are some photos of my stockpile of food. One of the cashiers asked if I was having a party!

The reason I am posting about this on this type of blog is that I thought it would be beneficial to have frozen meals in a freezer for all moms about to have a baby. The pregnant mama could do the cooking with a friend, or someone could give it as a gift, but to have these meals on hand would be AMAZING to have once family and friends stop delivering meals.

Did you freeze meals for postpartum? I didn’t, but I didn’t know much about freezing food back then. Would you do this in the future?

Tomorrow while cooking, I’ll try to upload a few pictures of the madness.

Love,

Lindsey

Tricia (Once A Month Mom)

Sunday 13th of November 2011

HA! Just realizing that the ping for this post came through now but it was a year ago. . .sorry I am so late to respond. ;(

Monday 14th of November 2011

No worries. I am re-vamping my website and glad to know that this pinging thing works. Whatever that means...

LOVE IT! And love that you are sharing. And, of course, love the fact that you love my site. It is always a pleasure getting a notice that a post like this has gone up! I can't wait to see the results. Best of luck.

Tricia

Lindsey (Mother Rising)

Tuesday 23rd of November 2010

Erinn! That's such a great thing to do for your clients. But dang, I couldn't do that... lol

Erinn

Sunday 21st of November 2010

I offer this as a service to my clients. We sit down and talk about food likes, dislikes, allergies, etc. Then I go away and build her a list of recipes and a grocery list of components. On a weekend day, we get together at the clients' house to cook all day and stock the freezer.

Spending all this time planning and talking is a great way to get to know someone, and I feel like I do a better job when I've had time to develope a relationship with the family. (-:

Kristen

Saturday 20th of November 2010

Thanks for the links! I am so going to do this in the spring time before the new baby gets here. I also plan to splurge and do a couple of trips to Your Secret Pantry too (where they do all the prep and cleanup!) By April I plan to have plenty of prepared meals in my freezer. But for now I have other things to concentrate on (we are getting Savannah settled into her new room so we can get her old room ready for Hunter).