Once A Month Mom

Today Parker and I spent the day at my sister-in-law, Chelsea's house.

It was our big "cook day."

Chelsea found this website Once a Month Mom and we decided we would give it a shot.

We went grocery shopping Saturday & yesterday afternoon for our groceries

and then cooked the meals ALL DAY today!

Basically Once A Month Mom is a website that has menus, grocery shopping list, and instructions for each person on cook day so you cook enough food for a month in 1 DAY!

(Obviously, you freeze the meals. Thankfully we have a 6 ft freezer in our garage to house the finished meals until we're ready for consumption.)

*We were planning last week before the Jan. 2011 menu was up

so we decided to try out Jan. 2010.

Here is a link to everything you need for what we did.

Also, here is a link for tips on getting started and here is a link of FAQ.

We bought most of the groceries at HEB and a few bulk things at Sams.

Here are some details of our day.

One half of the groceries

Other half

Here is 25 lbs. of chicken and 4 lbs. beef.

5 more lbs of chicken

All the veggies, diced and ready

(Talk about a lot of crying going on when the onions were chopped.)

All the chicken shredded

(We put the cooked chicken in the KitchenAid Mixer and it shred it.)

Buffalo Chicken Pasta

(This is in the ranking of one of my favorite meals- DELICIOUS!)

Chandler helping wrap the Eggwiches

The big container of stuffing for the Taco Wraps.

Somehow we made WAY too much.

This is missing a few meals that were still in the works but this is alot of the food from the day.

Overall we loved doing this and plan on doing it again at the end of the month.

We were EXTREMELY tired at the end of the day but it was worth it.

Here are some things we learned for next time,

hopefully if you do this it will help save you from our mistakes.

Specific to the January 2010 menu:

-I'm not sure what I did wrong with the rice, some how we made way to much but we think we did what it said. We were a little unsure if she was using Instant or Regular rice so that could have been the confusion. We bought a 4 lb. box from Sams and ended up using almost all of it.

-Toast the Eggwiches in the toaster, not the oven.

-For the taquitos do all the tortillas in the oil first and then stuff and wrap. This wasn't clear but we ended up doing it this way because it was burning our hands off trying to do it immediately.

-We ended up making the Cannelloni as a lasagna because we were a little unsure about the noodle rolling.

-We made mini-muffins instead of regular muffins, so you could do it either way but we liked these better. I love the "bite size" aspect of mini's.

General Tips we will do next time:

-Hire a dishwasher to clean as we cook!

-Have lots of BIG bowls ready.

-Chop everything the night before. We spent awhile just prepping things and felt like it took too long.

-Pre-read instructions better so we know exactly what the day looks like (for example: one of the recipes later in the day had me saute mushrooms, I wish I would have read that earlier and done it with the "prep" stage)

- We also might try grouping the groceries by meal.

Here is a list of all we made:

-Taco Wraps: 12 per person (with a gallon freezer bag of filling extra to use)

-Monterrey Chicken Quesadillas: 12 per person

-Asian Chicken Salad Pitas: 11 per person (we separated it into 6 in one bag and 5 in the other)

-Mexican UnStuffed Shells 2 gallon baggies per person (4 servings each)

-Buffalo Chicken Pasta: 2 gallon baggies per person (4 servings each)

-Hot Roast Beef Sandwiches: 2 gallon baggies per person (4 servings each)

-Homemade Taquitos: 19 per person

-Mandarin Orange Chicken: 2 gallon baggies per person (4 servings each)

-Layered Chicken Enchilada Casserole: 4 8x8 pans

It says it makes for 15 days of breakfast, 10 days of lunches and 15 dinners. Each person should have 2 meals of each recipe.

$137.50 per person