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An Old Idea Whose Time Has Come

© Holly Gumpher

One thing I think all moms have in common is the struggle to feed our family decent meals without feeling like we live in the kitchen. If you're a mom who works outside of the home the last thing you want to do when you get home is stand in the kitchen and cook. If you're a stay home mom, it can be tough to get the kids indoors in time to start supper or to convince them to play by themselves while you prepare a meal.

Other options I've tried over the years include eating out or ordering in and using a lot of convenience foods, things that are sold already prepared and frozen. Both of these choices can get expensive pretty quickly, and a lot of times they leave you feeling like you've done less than your best for your family. But there is another option: freezer cooking.

Freezer cooking, or once-a-month cooking, isn't a new idea. It comes from the era of deep freezing and canning, processes probably more familiar to our mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. But even though it's an old fashioned idea, it can applied to our modern lives with impressive results.

I first discovered freezer cooking 6 years ago, before I even had children. My husband and I were both working and going to school, so time was at a premium. I read about freezer cooking in the back of an old cookbook my mother had given me, and thought I'd give it a try. Unfortunately, my first attempt consisted of a large batch of bean soup, most of which suffered a horrible case of freezer burn in my freezer several months later. Oh well, I thought, I should have known better than to try an old idea from an old cookbook.

A few years later I ran into the idea of freezer cooking again. A friend showed me a book that had menus, shopping lists, and recipes for an entire month's worth of meals that could be cooked in one day. The idea still intrigued me, but looking at the recipes, I knew it would never work for me. My husband is a picky eater and these recipes would just never pass his approval. And how would I ever coordinate cooking all that food at once? Where would I keep it all? How would I afford all the ingredients at once? Alas, freezer cooking failed me again.

Several months ago I found some information on freezer cooking on the internet. This was real information and real recipes from real people who really feed their families this way. I read various tips, tricks and techniques that made me think I could actually do this. I found recipes that might actually pass muster at my house. I had to give it one more try.

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