Once-A-Month-Cooking Attempt: Successful!

Maybe it's because I'm nesting or maybe it's because I still carry the fear of being put on bed rest and not being able to care for my family as always. Or maybe it's easier for me to get completely motivated for a HUGE project than it is for me to get motivated 3 times a day to make a meal for my family. Whatever it is, I cooked and baked ALL DAY LONG today. Here's what 6 hours of hard work gave me: 

4 Meals of Indonesian Chicken
2 Meals of Sloppy Joes
2 Meals of Spaghetti (at least the sauce and meat)
2 Meals of Pizzaghetti
2 Meals of Chili
5 Meals of Breakfast Burritos
5 Meals of Southwest Burritos
20 Tutti-Fruitti Cups (Frozen Fruit Cups)
20 Striped Fruit Cups (Strawberry, Peach, Blueberry Frozen Fruit Pops)

My freezer full! Hooray! 

Needless to say - I'M EXHAUSTED! I have another list of food to make tomorrow. We'll see how my feet, back and Braxtons are treating me tomorrow. Right now, I can't even think about it! My husband's aunt gave me a cookbook that was entirely freezer meals and I was amazed at the foods they were freezing. Once-A-Month Cooking has been around FOREVER. My mom did it a couple of times when I was growing up. But I remember a TON of casseroles! And we're not really casserole type. So when she gave me that cookbook I figured out several ways to prepare some of our favorite meals and freeze them. 

One of the neatest things was how the majority of my meals were tomato based. I always make my own marinara sauce and it was super easy to make a TON of marinara and add it to the appropriate recipe then add ground beef in the appropriate amounts without really measuring at all. I just put enough sauce in my Pizzaghetti and Sloppy Joes that looked good to me and then used the rest for Spaghetti sauce. I added additional spices and "stuff" to the separate recipes and I was good to go. Worked GREAT! and saved me a TON of time! I figured that I made 22 meals and it took me 6 hours (not to mention the fruit cups that go alongside). I figure that start to finish from the time I start making dinner (no matter what it is) including clean-up it averages to about 30 minutes per meal. So by doing it this way, I saved 5 hours of time in the kitchen. Not to mention time figuring out what to have is saved and the nutrition of ready made meals is much better than anything thrown together at the last minute. 

Obviously this was NOT 30 days worth of meals but I also created a menu to utilize the meals in the freezer. For example, every Sunday after church something will come out of the freezer for that meal. Same thing with Wednesday nights before church, Monday nights (which are always crazy) and family movie nights. So after I ran out of freezer meals, I scheduled other meals around the freezer meals so there is never a day where I have too much cooking. Tomorrow (or whenever I recooperate) I plan on making:

5 meals of Banana Pancakes
5 meals of Blueberry Pancakes
3 Meals of Hawaiian Meatloaf
2 Meals of Meatballs
5 Meals of French Toast Sticks
2 Meals of Chicken and Rice
4 recipes of cookie dough

After I accomplish those meals I will have all snacks for the month and 20 breakfasts and 24 other meals ready to go. Pretty sweet huh? I'm hoping to have this figured out and ready to go when the baby comes - that will be REALLY nice! *Sigh* I'm tired! But I'm also blissfully content in my accomplishments. Now I'm going to see if maybe my sweet husband will let me go to bed. now.