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The Imperfect Homeschooler |
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Cardamom Publishers P.O. Box 4 Sturgeon Bay, WI 54235 |
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A New Bulk Cooking Concept
One of the issues that homeschooling creates is that of finding time to feed your family. Having kids home every day takes up most of your time, leaving less for food prep. If you’re the kind of homeschooling mom who drives her kids all over the place most days, finding the time and energy to cook becomes even harder. That probably explains why once-a-month cooking became a trend among homeschoolers some years back. I looked into it but lost interest when I saw that it seemed to require one or two days set aside just for cooking and assembling meals. I don’t have that kind of attention span. However, it did appear to me to be a money-saving venture, so I’d say that kind of cooking is for people with more time than money. More recently, some younger homeschooling moms I know got into “Dinner by Design,” a chain of food prep centers where cooking in large quantities becomes a social event. They reserved a time slot at the storefront, arrived as a group, and assembled meals while they chatted. All of the ingredients were laid out for them, as were the recipes, and everything was then packed up to go from the store to their freezers and eventually their ovens. From what I heard, they all had a great time. I thought about going with them, but when I learned that the cost of each meal worked out to $12-20, I balked. That was way over my meal budget. For years, I’ve stayed under $5/dinner (even when I had all four kids living at home), and I just couldn’t see making the jump to double digits per meal. We rarely go out to eat, but when we do, we hardly ever spend $20 in a restaurant, much less on a home-cooked meal. Recently I discovered a new twist on the bulk cooking idea that combines the once-a-month concept with the food prep center concept. Fix, Freeze, Feast; Prepare in Bulk and Enjoy by the Serving by Kati Neville and Lindsay Tkacsik bridges the gap between spending an entire day or two cooking at home and having a meal all laid out for you and ready to put together. These two women own one of those cooking stores, and they adapted some of their recipes for use at home. Unlike the original once-a-month cooking recipes, these use more expensive cuts and quantities of meat. For example, where once you would have cooked some whole chickens and picked them clean, in Neville and Tkacsik’s plan you buy a large package of boneless, skinless chicken breasts at a warehouse club, add ingredients and freeze with the intention of cooking the meat on the day you will serve it. Needless to say, this will cost more but save time. I can buy whole natural chickens on sale for around $3 each; a 6-pound package of boneless, skinless chicken breasts set me back almost $17. On the other hand, putting together some of these recipes wasn’t nearly as time-consuming as I thought it would be. My daughter Mary (17) and I set aside a day we called Home Ec (counts as school, right?) and tried a few of the recipes in this book. Then I tried a few more on my own. The result is that I now have 22 frozen meals in my freezer (we’d have more, but we’ve already eaten five). I didn’t have to give up an entire day to stand on the hard tile floor of our kitchen and cut up cups and cups of veggies. However, these meals did cost more than I like to spend on dinner. So I’m looking at them as substitutes for those times when I’m tempted to run out and grab dinner in a drive-through. Then there’s the emotional benefits. Every time I go into the freezer for something and see all those lovely meals stacked up, I just can’t help but smile. Before I describe the recipes we’ve tried from this book, I’d like to point out a very clever feature of it. The authors have included prepared labels for every recipe. You can either photocopy the labels right out of the book or go to the publisher’s Web site and print them out onto standard sticky labels. This is a great time saver. The labels are also a lot easier to read than handwriting on a plastic bag (especially my handwriting), and they include cooking instructions so you don’t have to go find the book each time and look them up. Now, on to the food. The day Mary and I cooked, we chose to make Chicken Parmigiana and Spanish Rice. Both recipes are based on a red sauce recipe that’s included in the book. Boy, does their recipe make a lot of red sauce! And who knew you could get a monstrous can of tomato sauce (one of the required ingredients) for a mere $2 at Sam’s Club? It’s a good thing I have a large stockpot, because we filled it to the brim with sauce and still needed another bowl. The sauce itself works out to about 30 cents a cup, which is a little more than I usually pay for jarred sauce at Aldi. On the other hand, this recipe does not
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include corn syrup, which you will find in most jarred red sauces. The more I read about corn syrup and how it’s making us fat, the more I’m avoiding it. The red sauce is also delicious. You don’t even have to cook it! You just assemble it and then freeze it in bags or use it in recipes, which is what we did. The Chicken Parmagiana makes three entrées of four servings each, and those are large servings. One entrée made plenty for dinner for the four of us, plus nice leftovers for lunch the next day. The cost of the three meals was $25.00 or $8.33/meal for four. Next time I make this recipe, I think I’ll cut the chicken breasts in half and then proceed, so that the servings are smaller. That will also cut the entrée cost in half. Mary and I also made Spanish Rice, which used almost all of the rest of the red sauce. This is a delicious recipe, and unlike the Chicken Parmagiana, I didn’t need to prepare anything (i.e. side dish) to go with it except a salad. This recipe makes six entrées of 6-8 servings each, which meant we ate it for dinner and had enough left for lunch two days in a row. It’s very good! Mary suggested that corn muffins would go well with it, so we tried that the second time we had this and she was right. This recipe cost $34.40 to make, but that’s for six meals, so it works out to $5.73 per dinner, which is my kind of pricing. Making the red sauce plus the two recipes did take up the entire morning and early afternoon, but I thought it was worth it for nine meals plus some spare red sauce. I think that as I do this more often, I’ll become more efficient and it won’t take so long. The next time I used this cookbook, I made a recipe in the evening after dinner…with my husband. (He saw the mess I was making and decided I needed help!) The recipe was Chicken Cordon Bleu, and boy, was it messy. We don’t have a lot of counter space, and we needed every bit of it in order to have room to press out the chicken breasts, dip each one in three different ingredients and wrap them up. The clean-up definitely took longer than the assembly! The result was twelve chicken rolls, which we divided up into five meals, putting two huge rolls in some bags and three big rolls in another. The other night we had them and they were delicious. We split three rolls between the four of us and had plenty. The recipe worked out to $23.06, so if you used four rolls per meal, your per-meal cost would be $7.69. Next up was lasagna. I had to make a small batch of red sauce, and added what I had in the freezer from that first time. We haven’t had the lasagna yet, so I don’t know how it will be, but I’m guessing it will be pretty good. The cost for two very heavy meals in 9”x 13” pans came out to $13.54 each. Considering I just saw Stouffer’s Lasagna (96 oz.) on sale for $11.99, I’m guessing this will turn out to be worth an extra buck-and-a-half. Since these lasagnas are so big, I think we’ll get two meals out of each one if it’s just the four of us for dinner, so that brings the cost down to $6.77 per dinner. Finally, I tried what looked to be the two easiest recipes in the book, Cam’s Ribs and Ginger Beef. Cam’s Ribs await us in the freezer; the recipe made three bags of boneless ribs in a homemade sauce for $32.04, or $10.68 each. That’s on the high side, but I bought the ribs on sale at the local grocery because Sam’s Club is an hour away and I wasn’t going to be heading in that direction anytime soon. (With gas at $4 a gallon, I don’t make long drives unless I have a long shopping list!) Then I made the Ginger Beef. Full disclosure: I used a cheaper cut of meat than suggested because, once again, I was at the local grocery and sirloin tip was too expensive. So this might have cost less than it would have with meat from Sam’s. That said, all I’ll have to do is toss these babies in the crockpot…my kind of dinner! We’ve already had one over egg noodles and everyone loved it. There were also leftovers for two lunches, so that was a bonus. The cost of three meals was $18.94, or $6.31 per meal. The best thing about these last two recipes is that you toss the meat in a freezer bag, add individual ingredients or a bag of sauce that’s easy to make, and freeze the whole thing. They’re easy to prepare and there’s little clean-up. I plan to try more recipes from this book. I really like the ease of putting these meals together. This seems like the perfect cookbook for a busy homeschooling mom.
© 2008 Cardamom Publishers/Barbara Frank
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