Cooking Day-Prep Day

Now you are officially getting started! Let me preface this segment by saying you need to read through all your recipes and get familiar with them. Doing this will give you a sense of how to organize the prep work. Do any recipes have shredded cheese? How much? How is the chicken or beef prepared? Shredded? Cubed? Browned? How many fresh veggies need to be cut? Questions like this will help you list your plan of attack, step by step.

Now here is a tip not found in the books I have and it may not work for you, but it does for me- cook your meat the night before! I put my chicken in my pressure cooker and while that is cooking, I will brown my ground beef or brown my other roasts and what not while that is cooking. I do this because it makes the cooking day that much easier. Cooking day then becomes more of an assembly day. It only takes about a hour of the night before to get the meat done and its worth it to me!

On cooking day, you want to prep "like" items; chop all veggies, shred all cheese, and....open all you cans! This is when some of those rarely used gadgets come in handy. Every month my pampered chef food chopper, my food processor and my salad shooter gets used! The salad shooter is actually my favorite way to grate cheese now! An electric can opener can be a lifesaver on cooking day!

Now, the important part......{insert drumroll}......when you get going, it is important to determine what type of recipes you are making. No, not chicken or beef, but HOW it's made.....oven, stovetop, slow cooker, assembly or other. It is crucial you mix it up! That way, you can get four or five recipes going at once! While things are cooking, you can do some "dump" recipes, which simply means that you throw all the ingredients into a freezer bag and you're done! It's a great way to get a few more recipes done while the rest are cooking.

Lastly, don't overwhelm yourself! Take it from me, who made this mistake when I started, DO NOT try to make 20 different recipes! Instead, choose ten different ones and double them. Is it really going to hurt your family to eat the same thing twice in a month? Or, if they throw a fit, ease into serving your freezer meals. Change it up with your regular "served fresh" meals. In a couple of months, you will have a great variety of meals that will get you through a month.

One more note, in case I haven't mentioned it before.....freezer meals are not all I serve my family! We still have grilled cheese sandwiches, or grill a steak, or even have a favorite of breakfast for dinner(fresh eggs, yum!). In our family, I can usually stretch 15-20 meals to last the whole month and sometimes even longer!