Once a Month Update

Gosh I can be wordy! Everyday I intend to do a brief post and it ends up being quite verbose. Just like I am in real life, I guess. Hard to get me to shut up.

Anyway, I wanted to give a brief (really!) update on the Once a Month Cooking project. Remember back in January when I tried it for the first time? It took my neighbor and I somewhere around 12 hours to make a month's worth of dinners for each of our families. Then The Girls made me a month of dinners right before Luke was born. As I approached cooking for my family again, my friend Kate, who had been doing the Once a Month thing for a year now, offered to take me under her wing.

So now we've cooked twice together, and it is amazing. She has planned the menu for us from these books. She has put all the recipes in a spreadsheet that allows you to select and create a grocery list. We split up the list and do the prep work ahead of time (chop veggies, cook meat). Then she comes over to my kitchen and we pound out 28 dinners for each of our families in approximately 5 hours. And get this: for about $100 each.

I'm hooked.

Kate's confidence, practice, and planning skills have made this so much easier. But even if she decides she doesn't want to be cooking buddies anymore (don't worry Kate, you didn't make a lifelong commitment :), I feel confident enough at this point that I would try to do it on my own. She picks simpler recipes to keep the prep time and the cost down. And we cut corners here and there. This isn't the Food Network, it's just dinner.

I'm getting dinner on the table shortly after Brian gets home from work. We're eating less take out. We're trying new recipes. And we're spending less money on groceries. I hope to find a way to keep it going.

(Gah! Still so wordy!)