By Karina Whisnant
One of the ways I am able to provide well for my
family during the week is to prepare dinner entrees for about 6 weeks at one
given time. I do this not just on my own but with a friend. I have
done it with several different, wonderful friends through the years. I
probably couldn’t stick to it if I didn’t have a friend taking the plunge with
me! We cook around 24 meals per family in an average of 8 hours. We
incorporate a lot of different meats and casseroles and really only repeat a
few recipes. Most of the 24 meals are different. Probably a better
way to think about it would be food prep instead of cooking. A recipe
could even consist of some raw meat in marinade, especially in the summer when
grilling is a treat. We are doing the hardest part, thinking about “What's for dinner?” ahead of time.
It is difficult sometimes to make the time for
it, but it is absolutely worth it. I have been doing this now for about
11 years and know that I would now have a hard time doing dinner any other
way. Here are some pictures that share some of the process. I know
it sounds hard and crazy, but you would be surprised how even on your own you
could cook several meals for the week and have them ready in the freezer.
It would change how you see dinner!
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There is no doubt that when you put groceries in
the fridge for cook day not a lot else fits in there! I love looking at
that food, knowing that in several hours it will be turned into close to 50
meals!
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The dining room table becomes the pallet for the
non-perishable food to go into the recipes. We love it when the table
starts looking empty.
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We buy most of our meat at Sam’s. Here is
an example of the 10 lb. “loaf” of ground beef that is a VERY reasonable price
for around 90% lean beef. I believe for this cooking night, we had
two of these to put in recipes!
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If you can ignore my cooking look, you
will see that we do use the Food Saver bags to store the meals. You
wouldn’t have to do it that way, but we find it preserves the food well.
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You can see some examples of the
food we were preparing that day. The Japanese Teriyaki Steak is
delicious!!
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This is a beef stroganoff sauce. We freeze
just the sauce which means you only have to warm the sauce and cook the noodles
the night you pull this out of the freezer. Dinner is served!
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Here I am just browning some of the almonds that
were going into a chicken recipe.
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There is my sweet friend Holly mixing us some
mini-cheddar meatloaves!
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