Leek and Bean Cassoulet

Long before I started doing once a month cooking I was regularly making this as a freezer meal.  It's fantastic, like a vegetable pot pie with fluffy biscuits as the crust.  It's great on a cold, winter day, and it's a complete meal that's packed with veggies.  If you have a food processor, it makes making the biscuit dough really fast and easy. 

Savory Muffins

My day goes a whole lot better if I start it with a hot, protein-heavy breakfast.  These fit the bill nicely.  They're easy and filling.  Plus they're portable, which makes a great breakfast on a busy morning.

Adapted from: Thriving Home
Difficulty: Easy
Category: Breakfast
Recipe Column: AJ

Meal Categories

Freezer to Pan: Requires no thawing.  These meals can be cooked straight from the freezer.  They're convenient for when you forgot to thaw something for dinner.

Heat and Eat: This means the recipe is a complete meal with protein and vegetables in it.  All you have to do is thaw and heat or cook through.  No need for anything else.

Simple Side: This meal requires a simple side like pasta, rice or a salad be made in addition to reheating/cooking the freezer meal to be a complete meal.  Or it can indicate a small amount of finishing work is required on the meal itself.

Some Assembly Required: These meals require some work to put together or finish after coming out of the freezer.

The Once a Month Process.

Many once a month cooking plans have you making one batch of each meal to put into your freezer.  I generally prefer making large batches, that will last me a few months.  This takes more time at the outset.  I generally spend 4 to 5 days cooking the first time to stock the freezer, but I end up with about 65 dinners from 16 different recipes.  After I get the initial cooking done I make 2 to 5 meals once a month to keep the freezer going and add variety.  This takes me 1 to 2 days.  Whichever way you want to do your cooking, the macro can accommodate and make your lists.  Planning is key to successful once a month cooking.

Using the Macro: The Categories Database

Once you enter a recipe, chances are you may need to add some ingredients to the 'Categories' tab.

Adding an Ingredient

You will know you need to enter a new ingredient because it will show up in the 'Uncategorized'  column of the shopping list.

Using the Macro: The Recipe Database

So, now that you know the basics of using the macro, you'll want to browse the recipe database in the 'Recipes' tab to see what you want to make.  You'll also probably want to enter your own freezer recipes, which I hope you'll share with me.

My Recipes

I have already entered a lot of freezer recipes into the database, and I will continue to add recipes and upload the updated spreadsheet periodically.  Eventually I will blog about each recipe in the database, but until then, I have put a comment about each one in the cell with the recipe name.  If you hover the mouse over the name of a recipe, the comment will pop up with my thoughts about it.  Most of the recipes I like.  I remove the ones that I truly disliked.  A few of them are works in progress with potential, and there are a number of them that I haven't tried yet. I hope this helps you figure out what you want to make until I get around to blogging about them.

Food Safety and Freezer Cooking

Before we continue with posts about using the macro I want to talk about the very important subject of food safety.  After all, the convenience of freezer meals doesn't mean anything if the food makes your family sick.  Freezer cooking presents some challenges to safely preparing food that I plan to address.

Safely Cooling Food

The Danger Zone in food safety is 40° to 140° this is the range where the bacteria that cause illness grow the most quickly.  It is recommended that food left in this range for two hours be discarded as it may cause food poisoning.  This presents a challenge when creating large batches of food which must then be cooled and frozen.  A large batch can take very long time to cool, leaving the food in the danger zone for an unacceptable amount of time.  As tempting as it may be,  never put hot food in the freezer to cool.  Putting hot food in the freezer can raise the temperature of the foods around it, causing them to enter the danger zone, ruining the safety and quality of the food.  Cool all food to at least room temperature before freezing  Some safe ways to cool food are: