Are you familiar with OAMC or OAWC?

[CSD610]

Originally Posted by modhatter

While commenting in another thread about escalating food prices and not eager to do the "cooking from scratch" method to save money, after working all day. Two posters answered me like I had two heads who practice OAMC and OAWC. Now admittedly, I had to Google it to see that OAMC meant = Once a month cooking, and that OAWC stands for Once a week cooking. So I dug around a little on line and see that people opt to spend one or two days cooking straight, then freezing in bags and labeling their food in order to not have to cook every night after work.

Hmmm. Spending my weekends cooking or cooking after work. Actually, truth be told. I don't like either option as I hate to cook, and I'm lousy at it anyway. But I am curious how many of you practice this. According to what I have read on line so far. People prepare often times two weeks or more of food at a time to be frozen. Now I have prepared one dish in larger quantities to freeze for one or two subsequent meals, but admittedly I never did a cooking marathon.

So I am curious for you who do, how you strategize your cooking to save money as well as time. Do you buy the huge bag of carrots and potatoes from Costco and indulge in a carrot peeling and potato cutting marathon on the weekends. Do you cook a large roast, and then try and figure out what kind of a meal can you make out of the excess? I know chicken is easier to batch cook and freeze. Do you freeze it in bags or use those microwavable plates with covers. But what else do you make and what kind of time do you devote to it?

I have been doing the once a week cooking for the weekends only for years. Thursday evening was always cleaning, laundry, cooking for me. That way I had it all done and could spend the entire weekend doing other things or attending the kids activities without having to go out to eat 3 days in a row.

As far as groceries I only purchase what I will need for that weekend, plan what I want to make and ensure it is something that is easy preparation, freezes well, reheats well and can go into a zip lock bag.

My time frame to get the cooking, laundry and cleaning done on Thursday evenings was from about 6pm - 10pm plus Friday was always trash day so all the scraps I had from the cooking went into the trash immediately and put out to be picked up the next morning.

[Nonchalance]

Originally Posted by Gandalara

Also known as "Dump Recipes"
(this is a large list of recipes using freezer baggies - but you can use reusable containers too)

I like these! Are we speaking of raw or cooked meat here?

Mmmmm, chili maple....

[Gandalara]

Originally Posted by Nonchalance

I like these! Are we speaking of raw or cooked meat here?

Mmmmm, chili maple....

Those are all for raw meat/poultry.
Bring it home from the store, marinade & meat go in bag, freeze.
Dinner is just a crockpot away


ETA: And label the bag, LOL

[oregonwoodsmoke]

I just made a batch of oat bran muffins. One recipe makes exactly 2 muffin tins full. If I double the recipe, I can make 4 muffin tins full. 32 muffins instead of 16 muffins and it takes maybe 1 second to measure out any additional 2 cups of oat bran and another 30 seconds to fill the extra cups. Mixing time is the same. Baking time is the same. Cooling time is the same. Cost to heat the oven is the same. I put them into gallon Ziplocs so basically wrapping time is the same.

Now I have 32 grab-a-breakfasts in the freezer. Or snacks for car trips. The downside is that I must own 4 muffin tins and 2 cookie sheets instead of 2 tins and one cookie sheet that I would use if I only made a single batch.

There is some monetary savings because the men will happily eat muffins instead of stopping at the drive through on their way to work. Oat bran is healthy stuff and much more healthy than an egg and sausage fast food breakfast sandwich.

The food is going to cost the same whether you cook it 5 different days or cook it all at once. There might not be any money saved by batch cooking. You can save time and there is monetary savings if the alternative is eating out or ordering take-out because you don't feel like cooking that night.

[snippet]

I did OAMC with my sister. We both have small families so it just made sense to do it together and split the food. It is much easier with someone else to help, plus she has a bigger kitchen.

When our kids left home, we continued OAMC. We'd take the kids bags of our cooking with the instructions either written on the bag or printed on a piece of paper. They LOVED this. What college kid doesn't appreciate food? LOL Anyway, it was blessing to everyone. If you make food for someone else, be sure to label everything and provide the directions.

As we ate our food, we made sure to add our reviews in the cookbook so that we could skip over a recipe that wasn't well received or tweak it for our tastes. We also used other recipes we had or found that were good candidates for OAMC til we had a pretty good list of recipes that we could rotate in our cooking each time.

We set aside a weekend and did it. It was a marathon, but it wasn't terrible either. Buy the food on Friday, then cook on Saturday. We used zip lock bags and tupperware-type containers, but I really preferred the zip lock bags. They really saved a lot of space in the freezer.