Cooking all at once

I'm back! I mean that figuratively and literally, because I just returned from Los Angeles. I'll spare you the boring details, but I was dreading January because of the amount of work I had scheduled. And it lived up to my expectations. This week I finished up a stretch of working 18 days in a row, and rewarded myself with a three-day weekend.

One thing that helped me through the many work days was a new menu-planning tool, Once a Month Mom, which provide menus for 30 days of cooking, to be done in one long day. (I was relieved to find that there's no official requirement that you be a mom - maybe they think childfree women have so much free time they'd never do freezer cooking? And men, don't they cook?) The most important thing for me is that they provide seasonal menus, and they tailor to diet (gluten-free, vegetarian, etc) and to family size. I have to tweak some of the recipes, because I use a bit more whole-grain flour and a bit less cheese than they usually call for. But I'm surprised to find that I can cook about 10 meals in a span of three hours.

I've made meals from the website: roasted tomato soup, zucchini fritters, veggie burgers, and muffins. Then I've tweaked my own: instead of making one pizza, I quadruple the recipe for sauce, dough, and cheese, and then freeze all those ingredients separately. I made the winter squash soup recipe from the website, but served it on top of pasta with roasted nuts, because we like pasta more than soup.

I'm not sure that I would want to have every single meal come out of the freezer. But if this shifts about 75% of the cooking (and clean-up) to the weekends, then that's about perfect right now.