Introduction

I love to cook, and I love to eat.  Specifically I love to eat a large variety of delicious foods.  I went to culinary school and since then my food standards have been high.  However, that can be hard to maintain in real life.  After the birth of my second child I felt like all I did was cook or clean the kitchen after cooking.  I tried simplifying my meals.  I tried having leftovers more often, but I still felt like I was on a constant treadmill trying to provide meals for my family that left little time and energy for anything else.  So I decided to give once a month cooking a try.

Once a month cooking (OAMC) is cooking for a couple days, freezing it all and then just thawing and reheating to eat.  I looked online at various OAMC plans, but I never found what I was really looking for.   There are many blogs that have a post about OAMC, but most of them have a list of about 30 meals which are also very similar to other blogs.  I looked to them for inspiration, but I wanted more variety than they offered and more taste.  Many of the freezer meals were very meat heavy.  I love meat, but it is expensive.  Plus I was looking for full meals, not just the protein.  Other ideas just didn't seem appetizing.  I keep seeing fried rice as a freezer meal. I just have trouble believing that fried rice tastes good after being frozen and reheated.  Although I may still give a try someday.

Since I couldn't find a OAMC  plan that fit how I like to eat, I created my own.  Creating a OAMC plan is a lot of work as it takes a great deal of organization to do OAMC effectively.  There are so many lists!  I needed a shopping list (a massive shopping list), a prep list and a list of meals in the freezer, plus lists of things to serve with meals.  I realized that all of this could be better handled by a spreadsheet and macro as opposed to doing it all myself.  The spreadsheet would have an added advantage of storing all the information to be used again should I decide to make these freezer meals again.  I developed a macro to create my lists and organize information to simplify my OAMC planning.

The macro and OAMC has changed my life dramatically!  The first time I did OAMC I cooked for 4.5 days and made enough dinners to last about 4 months and enough breakfasts for a month and a half.  It was a lot of work on the front end, both in developing the macro and doing all the cooking, but the time it has freed up is amazing.  I finally had time to do something other than cook and clean my kitchen.  Life is so much easier when I don't have to be constantly thinking about what we are going to eat next.  I started exercising again.  I got to do some sewing projects I've had for a while.  Occasionally the laundry even gets put away as opposed to everyone picking clean clothes out of the pile on the couch.

I've told a number of people about OAMC and my macro and many of them have expressed an interest in the program.  I am starting this blog to  share the macro and teach people how to use it.  It is not super user friendly, but I think once you get past the learning curve, it is a powerful planning tool.  Most importantly, it is customizable.  The spreadsheet comes with a bunch of my freezer meals already entered and ready to use, but if you have a freezer meal you like (which I hope you will share with me), you can enter it and let the macro do the list making for you.

After the first entries about using the macro I plan to post about the specific freezer meals I make to let you know how they taste and what I learn in the process.  I hope you find this blog and my macro helpful.