Time Saver: a benefit of cooking for your freezer

Part of the "Meals for a Month" series.

We love efficiency here in America. Henry Ford would be so proud of this assembly-line method of cooking!

That's a large part of what cooking a lot of meals in one day is all about. You prep all the meals assembly-line style. This saves you time in the chopping (get out that big food processor and let it go to work), the steps in a recipe (brown a bunch of ground beef and onions at once, then divide it up for different recipes), and the clean-up (cleaning the pan you cooked a giant box of pasta in and the colander it all drained in one time instead of each night for several different occasions).

Another time-saving benefit that most people forget about is this: if you do a huge grocery run for your ingredients for the big cooking day, then your grocery trips for the remainder of the month will be greatly reduced or shortened. Add to that one big shopping trip the non-dinner related items you'll need (peanut butter and jelly, deodorant, whatever), and you will be able to zip in once a week for a few items of produce, some bread, and a gallon of milk. Easy! In and out! You'll use a good bit of that grocery budget up front, but your weekly expenditures should be greatly reduced.

Happy Cooking!