The Advantages of Once a Week Cooking

  I was at the home of a relative last week. As I always am every time I visit them, I was impressed by how well they keep their home.

I have never seen their home in a state of disarray. Everything is neat and tidy, and tastefully decorated. People are always welcome to stop by, and I know they don’t do any last-minute clean-up to prepare for guests. The amazing thing is that these guys have a newborn and a first-grader, and jobs to boot. I tell you, the lady has some mad homemaking skills.

I decided to find out her secrets.

It was easy to pick her brain for these tricks. They turned out not to be secrets after all, since she was very generous about sharing them. The primary one is that she does all her cooking once a week.

Now, that may not be a big revelation. But consider this, how many hours do you spend cooking if you do it everyday, for every meal? Include the minutes used for the food preparation, and clean-up afterwards, and it’s a significant chunk of time.

I often cook over any given week, sometimes even everyday. I don’t know why. That is just how I’ve always done it. I’ve attempted freezer cooking, using the Dream Dinners method. But I didn’t like this method because the supposed cooking days were used mostly for food preparation. The frozen meals still had to be cooked, sometimes for more than an hour.

In order to streamline my cooking process, I needed a cooking day of my own, one that would end with containers of cooked, ready-to-heat meals in the freezer. I started with pancakes. A couple of days ago, my son wanted pancakes for breakfast. Taking a cue from my homemaking inspiration, I cooked the entire package of pancake mix. I now have a big freezer bag of pancakes.

And today, I spent a few hours cooking all our dinner entrees for the coming week. It wasn’t as exhausting as I thought it would be. It required a little planning (and I’ll share more of that in the coming days). But it was worth it.

I only had to prepare the ingredients in one go. I won’t need to wash pots and pans again anytime this week. All that means is that I can keep a cleaner kitchen this week! No cooking smells either.

Dinner in the coming days will be ready in a matter of minutes. Whatever will I do with the time I used to spend on cooking dinner? ;)

image from personal collection, ©mmacalincag2008