Once A Month Cooking--Modified

The fact is, I have a wretched freezer. There is no way I could ever fit a month's worth of meals into my side-by-side, and I probably wouldn't want to either! For example, I don't much see the point in pre-cooking breakfast. An egg takes all of two minutes to cook, and I can make a breakfast burrito for myself in five. No reason, really, to have them in the freezer for a 2-minute microwaving. We eat waffles or pancakes on the weekends, and they are my husband's joy to prepare! 

I'm still working out exactly what I want to have in the freezer at the beginning of each month, but one thing I do know is that there are plenty of days when I really want to cook! So my OAMC gets modified. 

On my last cooking day, I made 15 meals, which is distinctly NOT a month's worth of dinners.  We're just over a third of the way through the month of April, and we're left with seven of those meals. Obviously I'll be doing some extra cooking between now and my next big cooking day. 

What I had planned to do, and it seems to be working, is to make a double batch of anything that I make that is nicely freezable. Last night, we were at Safeway buying food for Easter, and we noticed that tilapia was on mega sale ($3.99/lb). So for Good Friday, I bought 6 filets and a bunch of peppers and made tilapia pepper foil packets. We prepped all six, immediately froze three of them, and baked the other three. Voila! Another meal added to the stash for later in the month!  Oh, and it was so good, it will definitely be added to my regular OAMC regimen--that said, if I see tilapia on sale again, I'll skip waiting for the end of the month and just buy  and make them when I can!

Now, if I can figure out what I can do with all of the ham leftovers, we'll be golden. Anyone have a great recipe?

Happy Easter!

Getting Started

It occurred to me that I have been posting to my LJ a lot about food, and part of that may possibly be because I am pregnant and food is very high on my priority list right now. Then again, I've always loved food, loved cooking since college, and figure it's time to start consolidating my thoughts about food and recipes and cooking methods into one place.

I'm not an expert to be sure. 

I've recently started Once a Month Cooking, and to be honest, most of the recipes that I see out there look fairly vile on paper. Having come from a household where we had gourmet-type meals just about every night, seeing so many recipes that include cream of mushroom (or chicken or celery) soup is pretty distressing. I'm not a casserole girl. I'm not a cream of anything girl. And yet I have a toddler, a husband, a career, and another baby on the way, and cooking every night is pretty distressing to me as well. So what's a girl to do?

I've been scrounging the web for really good recipes that I think will stand up to freezing. And I've been trying to convert some of our favorite recipes to something that will also stand up to freezing. So far, it's mostly been good. We'll see. I can stand a few casseroles. But I need to figure out a way to make them a bit healthier, too.

Meanwhile, this is what I've got on my list for next month's cooking. Thoughts are welcome. None of them use cream of anything soup (even the chicken & broccoli which traditionally does:

White Veggie Lasagna (I don't consider this to be a casserole)

Tilapia Pepper packets (in foil packets for baking later)

Pork chops with peppers/onions/tomato (partially cooked for later baking)

Chicken w/ broccoli (the one major casserole)

Chicken pot pies (the perennial favorite)

sausage rolls (this is an experiment using my recipe for sausage & peppers and then wrapping it in dough and freezing for later baking)

mango curry chicken (prepped and frozen without cooking)

So, thoughts are welcome.