Nov 16 2008
Once A Month Cooking
A while back, I dabbled in once a month cooking (known as oamc). It’s supposed to make things easier on a day to day basis.
The theory is you spend one day a month doing an enormous amount of cooking and everything goes into the freezer. You supposedly save money by buying things in larger quantities.
You buy and brown many pounds of ground beef. This meat, when cooled, gets doled out into the servings for the ground beef meals that you have planned.
You also buy an amount of chicken, if your preffered form. I like to use boneless breasts so I would have to cook up a lot of them and figure out how I’m going to use them and package and freeze them too.
I tried to do this on a much smaller weekly basis. Unfortunately, I was not a good labeler and I’d have all these packages in the freezer that I had no idea what it was. A few weeks ago, I finally threw 4 or 5 of these mystery packages away.
One concept I do like is if you get steaks, you put them in the freezer bags with the marinade. Then you thaw and cook. The flavor of the marinade really penetrates the meat and makes it much tastier. This is the only thing that I still do from my short days of a oamc’er.
To be really sucessful at this you must be a planner. When it comes to dinner, I am not a planner. I’m trying to get better and I’m still in my slump. I swear, I am cooking that chicken tomorrow. Maybe some type of crockpot recipe.
