I’ve been trying out Once A Month Mom cooking this weekend. I now have a lot of delicious-smelling dishes in my freezer.
It’s breakfasts, lunches and dinners – and you get the shopping lists for all the dishes as well as recipe cards, and the order of cooking to maximize time.
Lessons learned (remember this next time):
- If they say it is a good idea to chop vegetables, etc. up the night before – do it. I would have saved a lot of time today if I wasn’t stopping to chop for every dish.
- Try to spread the cooking out on two days. Either with a day for the actual dishes that needs to be cooked, and one for the dishes where the ingredients just needs to be combined before freezing, or dividing the categories between days.
- Dishes always takes longer than I anticipate – even as I’m cleaning up as i go along. These are the times when I miss a dishwasher.
- Even if I chose the Whole Foods menu, it is perfectly okay to *not* cook everything from scratch. I could well have done without making chicken stock from scratch, for example. (Admittedly, I bought the tortillas instead of making them myself.)
- I will always need more measuring spoons and cups than I think I do.
- Try to sort out, before starting, how much equipment is needed during the cooking as well as for the freezing afterwards.
- Some things will be harder, if not impossible to get in Norway. If I haven’t heard about it before, try to Google substitutes. Shopping should be easier than it was this time.
I’m still missing to toss together some of the no-cooking-now dishes, but all in all, I am very satisfied with what I produced in a day.
