Cindylouwho – Oh my gosh! Are you ready for this? Sorry for the BOOK!
1.) I am primarily cooking for DH and myself. DS is a very picky eater and I have a variety of meal items I can quickly make for him on demand. The number of 40 meals is most definitely not 40 different recipes! More like 17-20 I think. In many cases I am taking a recipe that was meant to serve 4-6 people and splitting it up into two pans before freezing. Then there is plenty for DH and I plus a little bit of leftovers for lunches the next day. Other recipes are big enough I can split them 3 ways.
For a larger family of course, you wouldn’t need/want to do that. But how I’ve been approaching it is that we will be eating all of these meals over the months of Nov and Dec. I’ve plugged each meal into my daily task list for those months so that I can make sure if we have Green Chile Enchiladas on Nov 1st that I am not planning on serving it again until at least Dec 1st – so there is a month in between us eating the same thing.
I suppose you could just plan to make a double batch of a particular recipe and then just plan to eat them about a month apart. It is often a lot easier to make two of the same recipe than it is to make two different ones!
Overall, I do strive to have a nice variety of the TYPES of recipes I freeze. Not all casseroles, etc. That is still a work in process because there are just some types of recipes that freeze well and you tend to see more ideas for those.
2.) I had no idea the Rolo cookie recipe was Paleo! Get me being all healthy! I like the idea of Paleo but that is not a direction we’ve gone in. I do have a good friend that is majorly into it and I’ll hit her up for ideas for you! She and I are going camping together over Halloween and we’ll have lots of time around the campfire to discuss such things!
3.) How long am I cooking? Well, that is the rub. It does take a fair amount of time. Out of a weekend, I am usually spending at least 8 hours on it. Sometimes that is broken between two days. Sometimes I do it all in one day and leave the other day for cleaning, etc.
I’ve struggled with that this year because I’m also trying to do HGP, there’s homework to do with DS, regular weekly cleaning chores and just STUFF that comes up. Let alone a minute to relax!
I’ve been doing this big PUSH over the last several weeks and when it has gotten crazy I remind myself that once November arrives I will be doing minimal cooking for the next two months. Which will be awesome! I did this last year too and it was so nice!
Where possible I have planned something really simple/easy for dinner on my major cooking day. But I won’t lie, we did have to order pizza once! And maybe make a run for the border another night…ahem…
I’ve been unable to go the route of purchasing an online plan because so many rely heavily on acidic ingredients (tomatoes, etc.) or spicy things and those do NOT work for DH. I did make/freeze lasagna, etc. for us but those are for just a few meals and one of those things where DH knows he will struggle after eating it but he wants me to make it anyway.
In order to do this big effort this year, I started planning all my meals very early – back in April or May I think? I use an Excel spreadsheet – “Make Ahead Meals” and every year I add a new tab for the year – I copy over what worked from the previous year and then build from there. The worksheet lets me see recipe name, how many batches of it I plan to make, any notes I want to make on serving suggestions, and a place to link to the recipe online or a note of where I have it saved on my thumb drive. I’d be happy to share it you wanted to take a look!
This year I went through my whole list of recipes and re-read though them and decided on a “rating” – Quick/Easy, Medium or Time Consuming. Then I looked at my daily task lists for Sept/Oct and decided when I was going to make what. I tried to only plan to do one Time Consuming recipe a weekend, along with maybe one Medium level recipe and maybe a couple of quick ones. I also tried to group up recipes with common factors.
It was helpful to cook and shred a boatload of chicken breast and then use it in several different recipes that called for it all in the same session. The other common factors I looked for were recipes that all used heavy cream, ricotta cheese or ground beef or so on.
The other thing I’ve done is include ALL the ingredients for the freezer cooking recipes in my Master Holiday Grocery Shopping list Excel spreadsheet. Once I decide what date I am going to make/freeze each recipe, I plug that into the Date Needed column in the spreadsheet. This allows me to resort the spreadsheet by date and see what I need to pop onto my grocery list for each week as it approaches. I’d be happy to share this as well if you want a peak.
It was time consuming to compile (which is why I started early!) but once I have it I can re-use the data from year to year. It also lets me filter/sort by ingredient and I can see where I might have groups of items that all use similar ingredients. This really helps me with my grouping of recipe “clumps” I mentioned above.
NOTE: My normal grocery shopping day is Thursday which works well for any fresh produce purchased for weekend recipes.
So THEN, once I have my group of recipes decided on for a weekend, I do another review and think about what I can do to be my own sous chef. On Friday night, after dinner but before dishes I will chop the veggies, shred the cheeses, measure out the spices, etc. Everything is put in a baggie or container and labeled as needed and put in fridge if needed.
This saves me a lot of time the next day! If a recipe called for peeled potatoes, I would peel and cut them the night before – they keep overnight in the fridge if covered with water. I may get out some of the pots/pans, cutting boards, etc. that I know I’ll need. I’ll set out butter to soften the night before. But I wait until first thing the next morning to set out cream cheese to soften, just to be safe.
Basically I just rack my brain as I scan the recipes for anything I can get a little jump on.
FINALLY, I decide on the order of my session – creating a little outline for myself, even if just on a scrap of paper. If I need to boil water to cook anything, meat, noodles, potatoes, etc. I plan to get that started first. If there are any ingredients I need that are already frozen I get them out to thaw. Common examples: cloves of garlic, frozen cubes of lemon juice, frozen chicken stock.
Then I would cut up and or prep any ingredients to be used in the recipes that I hadn’t already gotten to the day before. I’d probably go ahead and prep my dishes (lining with foil) and/or writing labels on ziplock freezer bags to be filled and set those aside. Then jump into the first recipe.
It depends on the recipes you are tackling, of course, as to what order would be the most efficient. If you are making a dough that has to chill, make that first then switch gears to something else while that is in the fridge, etc. I haven’t really formalized this part of things yet. I just try to think about it by Thurs or Friday before the weekend.
The whole process I described above – deciding on recipes, building all my spreadsheets, etc. - took place over the course of time (April – Aug) and things have also evolved from year to year as I learn what works best for me. This year I did a lot of repeat recipes that I knew we liked from last year. But with a few new ones thrown in too!
Oh, one more thought – I’ve been making cookies here and there but I have one big COOKIE WEEKEND planned for filling the freezer in a few weeks. One night this week I am going to go through and pre-measure all the dry ingredients for each cookie and put them in a labeled zip top bag. Then come the day, all I’ll have to do is dump and mix with the wet ingredients.
What I wish I could help with more was the Paleo side of things! But ultimately, with enough time and mulling it over and list making, you can take ANY combination of recipes and come up with a plan.
If you had a group of recipes you were looking at tackling, I would be happy to look at them and offer some suggestions along the lines of my approach above!