Edited: 20 Dec 2002
I find daily cooking to be a very inefficient use of my time. I am home schooling two while trying to keep up with a toddler and keep house all at the same time. So when 5:00 rolls around, I'm pretty much ready to throw in the towel -- it's pretty hard to do everything else and THEN get dinner on the table, too. I mean, there's only so much time in the day, right? Something has to give.
So I do bulk cooking. I have found that it takes just as much energy to prepare and clean up 6 full meals of an entree as it does one. So why do the same job and clean up afterwards six different times? Doesn't make any sense to me. Instead, about every three months, I take a week off school and just cook for a week until my freezer is full. (A full-day of once-a-month cooking works better for some people, but it just wears me out; so I do a few hours a day for a week -- works much better for me.) The rest of the time, I don't cook much at all. (But if I do, I almost ALWAYS cook 4-6 meals worth of whatever it is I'm making.)
There are some great books on this topic that will tell you more about cooking in bulk than I ever could. Here's a quick starter list from Amazon.com. I haven't tried all these books myself, so I can't personally recommend every one, but I can say I do like Jill Bond's books very much.
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Mega
Cooking by Jill Bond.
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Dinner's
in the Freezer by Jill Bond.
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Frozen Assets: How to Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month
by Deborah Taylor-Hough .
|
The Freezer Cooking Manual from 30 Day Gourmet
by Tara Wohlenhaus.
|
Month of Meals: One Day to a Freezerful of Entrees
by Kelly Machel.
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Once-A-Month Cooking
by Mimi Wilson.
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Month of Meals: One Day to a Freezerful of Entrees
by Kelly Machel.
|
Make-A-Mix
by Karine Eliason.
|
Prevention's Freezer Cookbook: Quick Dishes for and from the Freezer
by Sharon Sanders.
| |
Now that I've referred you to the real experts, I'll just list a few of the tips I've found to be very helpful to me.
TOOLS
You can't cook a month's worth of meals at a time with your normal, everyday kitchen tools. You need a few "up-scaled" items.
Mixing bowls. I quickly discovered that my set of glass mixing bowls -- you know, the kind with three or four bowls, each smaller than the last, that sit inside each other -- just wouldn't work. These are fine for cooking single meals every day. But for bulk cooking, you need SERIOUS mixing bowls.
At first, I tried a hint from one of my bulk cooking books -- I mixed huge batches of meatloaf, etc. in my large kitchen sink -- which of course I had cleaned and sterilized first! But even though it was perfectly clean, the whole idea kind of creeped out my friends and family. So I invested in some large mixing bowls instead.
I found some huge, stainless steel mixing bowls at Target for under $10 each. These are perfect. Get several identical bowls -- the largest you can store in your kitchen space -- but be SURE that they will nest very neatly in each other. Otherwise, they will take up WAY too much space. You absolutely NEED big bowls that are all the same size and shape that nest neatly together. I have found that six or seven huge but IDENTICAL bowls end up taking less room than a set of bowls in graduated sizes. They are also easier to use.
Surgical gloves. I buy latex surgical gloves from Sam's in bulk and use them liberally on my bulk cooking days. Two boxes of 100 gloves costs around $10. These have lots of uses:
| I wear these to mix large batches of meatloaf, meatballs, etc. There's no way my mixer could mix a batch that size -- I simply have to do it by hand. |
| I detest the feel of raw meat, but wearing the latex gloves means I don't have to touch it at all. |
| Especially when I'm bulk cooking, I really want to be careful about keeping the environment as clean as possible to avoid any cross-contamination from raw foods. Since the gloves are disposable and cheap, I can change them often and keep everything clean. |
| They're also good for wearing when cutting onions or garlic -- keeps your hands clean and odorless. |
| And they make very quick work of deboning roasted chickens and turkeys. No need to wait for the birds to cool, either -- I keep a set of winter gloves in my kitchen, and wear them underneath the latex gloves when handling very hot (or very cold) foods. |
| Oh, and perhaps most importantly... when you have small children in the house, you sometimes have to drop everything QUICKLY and run grab a child out of danger, change a diaper, or referee a fight. This can be difficult when you're up to your elbows in raw hamburger meat. But if you're wearing latex gloves, you can pop them off in a flash and grab the baby with CLEAN HANDS. Very important! |
Roaster Oven. I used to love my crock pot. But when I started bulk cooking, I quickly found that even the largest available crock pot (I can't find one bigger than 6 qts) just won't do the job when you're cooking 6-10 meals worth of an entree at a time.
Rival makes a 20-qt roaster oven that can function like a crock pot. I think I got mine at Target for less than $60, and it has been one of the best kitchen investments I've ever made. You can manually set the temp anywhere from 150 to 450, so you can slow or fast cook with it, and it will hold four whole chickens at once!
Also, if I'm not mistaken, it's also more energy-efficient to slow cook a bunch of chickens in the roaster than in the big oven. I'm not 100% sure of that, but it stands to reason.
Uses:
| Typically, I will cook, debone, and chop anywhere from 4-8 chickens and a couple of turkeys at a time. Then I take ALL the bones and drippings, put them in the roaster with all the ends and pieces from carrots, onions, celery, and whatever from the recipes, and make a HUGE pot of broth. I use that in place of water in all the chicken recipes -- for example, in recipes calling for pasta, I cook the pasta in broth instead of water. I just don't have any other vessel big enough to make that much broth. |
| Another thing I use it for is soup. I will make ahead, can, and freeze about 12 qts of green pea soup for my kids' lunches -- they prefer hot meals but I'm soooo busy during school! Sometimes I also make black bean soup. Cheap, easy, and tasty. |
| Also, I usually keep a large container in the freezer that I use to store leftovers -- you know, single servings of meat, veggies, whatever -- that won't get eaten otherwise. When the container is full, I dump it into the roaster with a few cans of tomatoes or V8 juice and make "leftover soup." It amazes me how many meals I can get out of throw-away-sized servings of leftovers. Not everything tastes good in it, but a lot of things do. A crock pot simply isn't big enough for the job. |
I will admit that the roaster oven is difficult to store. It's big enough to be an eyesore and it won't fit in an under-counter cabinet. I finally cleared a shelf in my pantry, and keep it there.
STORAGE TIPS
Freezer bags. I store most of my freezer meals in gallon-size Ziplock freezer bags. I buy them in bulk from Sam's Warehouse. These are great because they are cheap, durable, and disposable (no washing!). However, if you just fill the bags with food and freeze, they don't stack well. They are always sliding around and falling out of the freezer -- it can be a real mess. So I also use cake pans.
Square cake pans. This storage solution took me awhile to figure out but it works GREAT. No matter what kind of freezer you have, you will find it easier to store and retrieve meals from it if they are all packaged similarly. The more alike in size and shape the meals are, the more you can pack into a freezer, the more neatly they will stack, and the easier they will be for you to find.
So go to Target or Wal-Mart or wherever, and buy a bunch of inexpensive square cake pans. Again, be sure they are identical and that they stack neatly. You don't want a bunch of differing sizes and shapes -- it will defeat your whole purpose. I found that 9x9x2" pans work best for my family of five -- they will hold one meal's worth of an entree with very few, if any, leftovers. I bought ten, but I believe I could use as many as 20 on my cooking days. If you have a larger family, you may want to choose a larger, rectangular pan. The key is to choose pans that are square or rectangular, that hold one meal's worth of food for your family, and that nest for easy storage.
When you mix up a meatloaf, or casserole, or whatever, divide your mega-batch into one-meal sized portions, and pack them in gallon freezer bags. Be sure to squeeze all the extra air out of the bag before sealing it. Then, set the bags in the cake pans before freezing. You can stack them, as well. Then, when the food is frozen solid, you can remove the bags from the pans. They will all be the same size and shape, stack easily, and will be easy to identify at a glance.
When you're ready to use one of your frozen meals, remove the bag from the freezer, open it, slide out the frozen "brick" of food, and pop it back into the cake pan for baking. It will fit perfectly! OR you can defrost the bag in the microwave and then cook it in whatever you want.
Marking pens. I use a special blue marker made for marking canning jar lids to write the item and the date on the bags. These pens are available wherever you can find canning supplies (I got mine at Wal-Mart). Permanent ink pens work, too, but they can rub off a frozen bag.
Canning jars. I got fed up with all my Rubbermaid and Tupperware storage containers some time back and pitched them all. Now I don't use anything but Ziplock bags (described above), and 1-qt, wide-mouth canning jars.
Several people have expressed surprise that canning jars can be used for freezing. Sure they can! There is a whole section in the Ball Blue Book Guide to Home Canning on freezing food using these wonderful jars. Canning jars ...
| are air- and moisture-tight, which prevents freezer burn, loss of color, absorption of odors, and loss of vitamins; |
| are glass, so they don't stain from storing vegetables like tomatoes and beets; |
| don't impart any unpleasant taste or questionable minerals to the food (like some fear aluminum foil might); |
| are uniform in size and shape (so they are easy to organize in the fridge); |
| are transparent (so you can easily identify the contents) |
| are easy to handle; |
| are microwave- and freezer-safe; |
| fit beautifully in the dishwasher (plastic flies all over the place). |
In short, they're perfect!
Yes, they can break, but they are cheap and easy to replace. Also, you can grab a jar of homemade soup from the freezer, take it to a sick friend, and not have to worry about getting your container back. I never use anything else any more.
Be sure to choose wide-mouth jars. You could use the smaller ones, but you then have to completely defrost the food in order to get it out -- with the wide mouth jars, you can thaw it just a bit under hot running water, then slide it right out of there.
Also, you MUST leave enough head room at the top so that the freezing liquid doesn't break the jar as it expands. The Ball Blue Book recommends 1/4" head space for pint jars, 1/2" head space for quart jars. Dry pack foods can be packed with no head space.
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I'm sure I'll think of more tips from time to time, and I'll try to add them here. Hope this helps you get started!
