Once A Week Cooking

We eat out a lot. When I say a lot, I am talking every morning for breakfast, every day for lunch and at least 4 out of 7 nights a week.  There's 3 of us at home (my husband, my 15-yr-old and myself) and we all have hectic busy schedules so it's easier to grab breakfast through a drive-thru, lunch through a drive-thru and then pick up Chinese, pizza, or chicken for dinner.  Unfortunately this isn't so great on the pocketbook or the waistline!

I have been wanting to do "once-a-week" or "once-a-month" cooking for a long time but could never get motivated to go through with it.  Thanks to a friend of mine who actually did this last week, and posted pics of her progress/meals I finally decided to just go for it!  Last Sunday I got up, planned my meals for the week, went grocery shopping (husband went with me to help since I had a very detailed list he could follow) and then came home and started cooking. It took me all day - yes 7 hours of cooking, BUT it was so worth it!! This is what I produced in that 7 hours....

I made a meatloaf, beef stroganoff, baked ziti, 12 twice baked potatoes, 3 bags of cooked chopped chicken, 3 bags of ground beef mixture (mixed with peppers, onions, shredded carrots), 7 sausage, egg, cheese biscuits for breakfasts, 6 breakfasts pizzas, 1 gallon of chicken stock and 1 bag of chicken/cream cheese/chive mixture to be used inside crescent rolls for chicken packets.

I was able to pull out our dinner every morning to get it defrosted and with only about 15-20 minutes prep each evening we had a wonderful home-cooked meal. I made burritos one night with a packet of ground beef and a packet of chicken and had so much left over I rolled each burrito individually and froze those so now we have 13 burritos to add to my dinner choices.

Today I am planning next week's menu and going to add a few things to what I currently have stored in the freezer so hopefully if I am able to do this for a couple of hours every weekend several weeks in a row, then I will get enough stored up so I only have to cook one big day/month.