Yesterday I told you about how the first step in our OAMC day went. I am following the cooking steps as laid out in Once-A-Month Cooking Family Favorites: More Great Recipes That Save You Time and Money from the Inventors of the Ultimate Do-Ahead Dinnertime Method
We had all the items purchased. The processing stage is where you essentially cut ,dice, slice, press, pound and peel for a few hours.
I got enough bowls, my cutting board and knives all set up to hold the ingredients.
I washed, washed and washed some more vegetables. After washing, I did alot of dicing and slicing until my bowls looked like this.
Thank goodness for my Pampered Chef chopper. I had mound of celery to cut.
After cutting and processing for about 2hours, the book gave me a warm congratulations telling me the hardest part was over. Yeah, ok. The hard part was right about now Mystery Husband was more interested in the football game than cooking. Now granted, we had been at this for about 3 hours and the end was no where in site.
So we were on the assembly part of the process, which in my opinion proved to be the most challenging part, even though the author says that the processing was.
Do you have any tricks to make the processing stage of OAMC go faster? Do you try to use a limited number of ingredients?
No related posts.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
The only thing I do to limit it is choose meals that have crossover ingredients. Of course, I don’t do “true” once a month cooking. I just do some bulk cooking & freezing to have emergency meals on hand. I’m not sure I’d want to eat meals made from the same 3 items all month long. lol
I would use a food processor anytime I could rather than the PC chopper. I have that too, but it’s so much more work than pressing a button and watching your items get chopped to bits in mere seconds. That might speed things up!
Shannon Reply:
October 6th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Rebecca,
Do you know that with all the cooking I do, I dont own a food processor!!! So what brand Food Processor do you like and should I invest in one?
Kelly Reply:
October 6th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
I have a Kitchen Aid and stand by it. It was my first KA appliance, I have had it for about 11 years or so. I love it, it has a small bowl that fits inside the big bowl. It chops, shreds/grates, slices. LOVE IT!
Shannon Reply:
October 6th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Kelly,
11 years is a long time for an appliance.!
I love my kitchenaid food processor. it is a true lifesaver.
I love the food chopper, since you can control better how fine things are chopped and it is sooo much easier to clean (diswasher) versus washing food processor container and such. But, I have both…and they serve different and wonderful purposes. I also find that doing this with others is also a time-saver. If you know of someone else doing this, why not go in together and dice/chop/peeel etc. and split the ingredients. Hope this helps!
Shannon Reply:
October 6th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Betsy,
You know I tried to convince my sister to do this with me, but she said she would, but I think she was just being nice.
Also, that is the reason I never bought a food processor – clean up.
You are so very brave. I can’t wait to see how this goes. And your photos are so pretty!!
I tried this just last week. I spent about 4 hours total in the kitchen with the clean up and ended up with over 20 meals. It is time consuming for sure, but totally worth it in the end. I used ‘power cooking recipes’ that use the same base ingredient and then a minimal amount of other ingredients to finish off each recipe(I would say less than 5 a piece). Cooking 5lbs of ground beef I used a pound for each recipe and ended up with chili, italian beef hoagies, beef stroganoff, beef taco mix and sloppy joes. Then I did the same with chicken. I also made a pork roast in the slow cooker and a few things from stew meat. So far everything has tasted great and was extremely easy to heat up and serve. There are only 2 of us, so there was plenty left over of each for another meal. These could have been divided in half and given us that many more frozen meals!
“until my bowels looked like this”
Bowl= a rather deep, round dish or basin, used chiefly for holding liquids, food, etc
Bowel= well, something else :)
This is one of those words that a spell checker won’t find. Reminds me of the time my husband was sending an e-mail at work and ended it with “Sorry for your inconvenience”. However, he spelled “incovenience” wrong and spell check corrected it to “Sorry for your incontinence”. He noticed after he hit send.
Shannon Reply:
October 7th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Suzette,
I am laughing so INCREDIBLY HARD RIGHT NOW.
I am sure no one wants to know what my bowels look like. That would be a whole different kind of post LOL.
Sorry for your incontinence is hysterical.
Thanks for the good laugh at my expense (oh and your poor husband too).