Posted on 10/18/2001 5:52:25 AM PDT by callisto
Cook for a day, eat for a month
A handful of recipes and a freezer add up to more family time
CARY - Mary Lanier used to cook dinner every day. This year, she has cooked four times, total. Yet almost every evening, her family of five has a home-cooked meal hot from the oven.
No, she doesn't have a personal chef, a live-in cook or a fairy godmother. Lanier does all the cooking herself. She just does it 25 to 50 meals at a time, once every two or three months.
"People think you're a nut," she says. "They think you have to be really organized or anal or something. I'm just lazy."
But Lanier is not so much lazy as she is very, very busy. She's a wife and mother of three young boys who teaches accounting three days a week at Methodist College in Fayetteville (a 90-minute one-way commute) and has a night job on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Her husband, Charles, works full time as a statistician for the state. Cooking was never a high priority for either of them, but they both wanted the family to have hot, home-cooked meals every night.
"Every day it was the same. 'What are we going to eat?' 'I don't know. What do you want to eat?' 'I don't know. What do you want to eat?' " she says. "We'd have these fights about dinner. I wondered if the marriage would survive."
So 2 1/2 years ago, pregnant with her third child and told she would be on bed rest near the end of her term, Lanier decided to solve her dinner dilemma once and for all.
She went to the Eva H. Perry Regional Library in Apex and punched "cooking" and "bulk" into the computer, looking for help in a cookbook.
"The first two had recipes that served like 25 people. But this one was just like a godsend," she says.
Lanier's godsend was "Once-A-Month Cooking" by Mary Beth Lagerborg and Mimi Wilson, two Colorado women who self-published it 20 years ago. Written from a Christian and distinctly housewife point of view, the book nonetheless was revolutionary in its approach to time management in the kitchen.
The book lays out how to cook the most meals in the least time -- not with quickie recipes but with simple, old-fashioned family favorites whose ingredients and kitchen prep can easily be grouped together. The cook shops and cooks only once a month. On cooking day, all the ingredients are set out or prepped (for instance, onions and carrots are chopped). Lanier assembles the dishes in batches, according to their main meat ingredient (beef, chicken or pork). The dishes are labeled and frozen, ready to thaw and cook later. The cook can choose from two-week or one-month cycles of 14 recipes, depending on how many different dishes the family wants to try.
"It's a long day, but it saves so much time all the other days of the month," Lagerborg says in a telephone interview. And with a variety of meals in the freezer, "you're not always falling back on tacos, spaghetti and pizza -- you know, the quick stuff."
Cooking once a month (or nearly once a season, in Lanier's case) not only saves time in the kitchen, she says, but also saves money and lets her family eat better and spend more quality time together. If someone drops in or she is invited to a potluck, dinner is never a problem. She can even take extra meals to neighbors with new babies, friends with a death in the family or a relative who's elderly or sick. After a power shortage during Hurricane Floyd, when her meals prematurely thawed in the freezer, she fed practically all her neighbors.
The first time she used the cookbook, Lanier followed the authors' directions to the letter, even including ingredients she knew her family didn't like. But after 2 1/2 years, she has enough confidence in her method to drop some ingredients (bell peppers), scratch unpopular recipes (sweet-and-sour chicken) and double up on the favorites (Linguine a la Anne). Since the book's recipes often serve six to eight, each usually provides two meals for the Laniers. The whole family likes the book's casseroles and pasta dishes. Lanier has also added her own favorite, freezer-friendly recipes from other sources to the rotation.
Lanier has customized the method, too. Instead of freezing foods in baking dishes, she lines square pans with heavy-duty foil and wraps it around the food. Then she freezes the foil-wrapped package, without the pan. When it's time to cook, she peels off the foil and puts the food in the pan she used to form the package -- a perfect fit. She labels each dish on its side with marker written on masking tape ("the only thing that will stick").
She uses an Excel spreadsheet for her grocery list. For her most recent cooking day, she typed in ingredients for each of the 10 recipes she would prepare and its grocery category, such as canned goods or dairy. Then she re-arranged the list by category and consolidated quantities. That way, a trip to the grocery store -- even with three boys in tow -- is a 40-minute, $109 surgical strike instead of a meandering mess. "I hate to shop," Lanier says.
In preparation for the big day, she cooked 4 pounds of chicken thighs in a slow cooker a couple of days earlier and 5 pounds the night before. That not only gave her 9 pounds of cooked chicken to work with, it also meant she had homemade chicken stock for her recipes. Just before going to bed, she set boxed and canned ingredients and spices on the small round dining room table off the kitchen.
The big day
With all that work done in advance, Lanier arose at 6:30 a.m. on cooking day, ready to prepare 26 family meals before 2:30 p.m. The kitchen was reserved for the day's efforts, so instead of their usual oatmeal, the boys -- Noah, 15 months, Colin, 5, and Kirk, 8 -- got reheated pumpkin muffins from the freezer. Then, lunchboxes filled with sandwiches (also from the freezer; Lanier makes a batch every 1 1/2 weeks ), they headed to day care and school in Raleigh with their dad. At 7:30 a.m., she had the kitchen to herself. Pajamas traded for a print jumper and gray sweater, Lanier calmly sipped tea from a thermal mug. She pointed out her white sneakers. "The first time I did this, I thought, 'I'll just wear my slippers' because we don't wear shoes in the house. But by the end of the day, my feet and back were hurting."
She needed shoe support because for the next seven hours she would be on her feet -- chopping, sauteeing, stirring, portioning, washing pots and wiping spills. It's a long day of cooking. And this is what Lanier calls "half-day." On a full day, cooking until 6 or 7 p.m., she would assemble twice as many meals.
Lanier worked on her longest-cooking dishes first: Denise's Black Beans, her husband's favorite, and Split Pea Soup, eaten only by Mary and Colin.
She began by chopping a day's worth of onions, three huge yellow ones, in her food processor, making the bits small enough to escape kid detection. Then she partially cooked Italian sausage, cut it up and added it and the canned beans and spices to the slow cooker for the black beans dish. Then she chopped turkey ham and added it, split peas she had soaked overnight and other ingredients to a soup pot. By 8:45 a.m., two recipes (four meals) were under way. When they have cooked and cooled, she will package them in 1-quart plastic freezer bags and store them in the freezer.
Next came a family favorite, Linguine a la Anne. Lanier made two batches of this pasta dish with ham and a creamy white sauce. As the sauce and noodles cooked, Lanier lined four square foil pans with heavy duty foil, then portioned the food and wrapped and labeled the packages. She stacked them in the freezer, supporting each with cardboard or a magazine until they hardened. Four more meals done.
At 10:15 a.m., Lanier used the same method to package Farmers Casserole, a dish with ham (two meals) or sausage (two meals), hash browns and eggs. At 10:35, she did the same for Baked Eggs, a cheesy ham, bread and eggs dinner that can double as a weekend breakfast (two meals).
She took a break just before 11 a.m. to clean her pots and pans with a sponge scrubber, pointing out another advantage of her method: "I don't have to wash pots and pans every night."
Stovetop Barbecue Chicken was next. She started the sauce of ketchup, broth and onions in a skillet then peeled the skin off chicken thighs. "They're cheaper and they have more flavor than breasts," she says.
As the barbecue chicken simmered, she took the slow-cooked chicken from the refrigerator and began to snip it into bite-size pieces. She also broke up the meat from a cooked turkey thigh. After a lunch of her just-cooked Split Pea Soup, she assembled the remaining poultry dishes (Turkey Tetrazzini, Chicken Scallywags) and ground beef dishes (Meatballs, Baked Beans and Burgers). By 2:30 p.m., time to go pick up her boys at school, she had 26 new family meals in the freezer.
When she had finished, Lanier made a chart for her husband of the dishes, quantities and freezer locations. For example, "2 Baked Beans & Burger 3I" means that two baked bean dishes are stored on the third shelf of the inside freezer. (Lanier stores some of her meals in the freezer of an extra refrigerator in the garage. All the meals for a month would easily fit in a regular or side-by-side freezer compartment -- if it isn't already stuffed with ice cream and Popsicles.) When he cooks a meal, Charles checks it off the list. The family rounds out the dinners with salads, vegetables and bread, all easy on the cook.
Most of the meals take at least an hour in the oven, longer if the food wasn't put into the refrigerator that morning to thaw. But instead of messing around in the kitchen, Lanier uses the time to mess around with her kids.
"I help with piano lessons. I'm playing with the baby," she says. And she does still cook a little, when she feels like it -- if it's eggplant season or she finds a good piece of fish.
The last step of cooking day may be surprising, but it's a recommendation in the book that Lanier always follows. That night, with a month's supply of dinners in storage, the family goes out to eat.
"You're so tired by then, you don't appreciate what you've cooked," she explains.
Food editor Susan Houston can be reached at 829-4863 or shouston@newsobserver.com
This could be the "ticket"! (as in 'meal ticket')
FRegards! without the FReezer burn!
/john
Freepers with extra fridges or freezers in unheated garages need to beware of a caveat. During extremely COLD weather, the heat exchange between the fridge/freezer and the surrounding cold air is actually TOO fast, and the fridge/freezer compressor doesn't like it and will stop running. And, depending on the model, it won't try to restart itself, either, once the air warms up. This can cause a loss of everything you've got stashed in that garage fridge/freezer.
What happens is that the compressor runs to remove heat from inside the fridge and force it into the ambient air in the garage. When the heat exchange is too rapid, the compressor thinks it has no work to do - and stops. Admittedly, this is probably a problem only on older fridges (which our garage model is) and protection circuitry is likely to be present on newer models. Further, many people buy freezer-only models EXPRESSLY to put in the garage, so they are likely to have protection/restart cycling circuity.
But if you do recycle an old working fridge by putting it in the garage, be aware that when outside temps get down to around 5-10 degress F. for an extended period of time, be watchful of what your garage fridge is doing. Fortunately, a restart is simple. Unplug for a few minutes. Plug back in. Compressor should start up again.
This happened to us a couple of winters back, so forewarned is forearmed.
Michael
I give my family one delivery night per week(usually pizza). I love to cook, especially with fresh veggies and fruits, but in wintertime I love to make HUGE pots of soups, stews, and sauces and freezing portion-size containers makes feeding everyone a cinch when they're in a hurry.
After preparing meals for a family of seven for about 20 years, I find it much harder to cook for only two, now that the kids are grown and gone.
We don't do this, but this is a popular method for a lot of homeschooling families I know.
My kinda woman!!!!!
Seriously, I understand where she's coming from. After a day in the kitchen putting up food - the last thing on earth I am interested in doing is dealing with dinner. Generally, I'm not even interested in eating.
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