Once a Month Cooking–How did it go??

I would consider our first attempt at once a month cooking a success! 

If you’re looking for the recipes that we went with check out this post.

First thing Friday morning I loaded 8 chicken breasts into the slow cooker so that by the time we started at 7 I had that ready to be cubed.  You have no idea how much time this alone saved!  So much easier than cubing the chicken … then sautéing.  Great idea!

Throughout the day I got all of the vegetables chopped.  All but the asparagus could be finely chopped, which meant I could make good use of the food processor.  With a zip, zip, zip I had 3 onions, 2 carrots, 2 heads of garlic and 4 heads of broccoli chopped.  That took maybe 30- 40 minutes?

We finished dinner and my hubby got the kitchen spotless and ready to go.  We started right around 7. I did a majority of the cooking and he followed me around stealing my dirty dishes and packaging up the stuff to freeze.  He was also on baby duty and managed to wash a load of diapers, give the kiddo a bottle and get him down for the night.  I truly couldn’t have done it without him. He had my pots clean before I even realized I needed for another dish. He also kept things moving into the freezer to cool, then into labeled bags to freeze. 

I got the beef going for the taco sleeping bags and taco pasta while he got the baby ready for bed and make the Teriyaki chicken.  While that was cooking up I got the batter all set for the waffles.  With the waffle batter done I finished up both the taco dishes. Delish!  We had already made both of these earlier in the week so we knew they were good.

While Andrew got those packed up and started making the waffles, I got the broccoli soup going.  I added a bit extra cheese to the soup, but I grew up in Wisconsin, I add extra cheese to everything.  At this point it was 8:00, only one hour in!

Broccoli soup was easy enough, and the chicken chili was even easier!  Dump all ingredients into pot, simmer for 20 minutes!  Chili was a little spicy for my liking, but I think a good dollop of sour cream will take it down a bit.

While that simmered away I made the pesto.  I don’t make pesto enough, and I should because I grow bushels of herbs in the summer.  I’ve never had one made with asparagus, and it actually was pretty tasty!

Not much left after that!  We threw together the artichoke sundried tomato chicken pasta minus the sundried tomatoes because I realized mine were really old and way past the point that I could rehydrate them.  We decided we’d just freeze as is and mix it with pasta sauce when we ate it later.

I’m pretty sure Andrew was still working on waffles at this point.  I kept walking past the waffle iron and couldn’t wait to try one.  It make the kitchen smell like a snicker doodle cookie.  YUM!  We had some for breakfast this morning and they were delish!

We closed the night with some pop tarts that I forgot to take pictures of.   I filled the pop tarts with peach butter and apple butter that I made last fall and man, are they good!

We made all 10 recipes in about 2.5 hours.  We ended up making 13 dinners, 7 lunches and about 14 breakfasts.  Not bad for a Friday night hey?

More to come later on my thoughts on the whole process … for another post!

Think you’ll try it?

Until the next time …
The girl behind the lama
~LMM