March : Month 1

I ordered my cookbook in mid Feb. and a week or so later it arrived. It was laid out in an orderly fashion...a list of meals followed by a pantry list, a grocery list, and preparation instructions. There were several "cycles" to choose from, both 30 days and 2 weeks. The thought of trying 30 new recipes at once, or even 14, was a little frightening. I picked a few I liked, picked a few tried & true recipes I thought would freeze well, and tossed in a frozen pizza or two for a total of 12 meals to cook (14 counting the pizzas). This doesn't sound like much, but for our family of 2.5 it lasted a full month.
The month's menu went something like this:

Stuffed shells
Jerk Chicken
Jerk Pork
Breaded Pork Chops
Basil Pan Burgers
Home-made pasta sauce
Pizza
Enchiladas
Pepper-Lime Chicken
Beef Stew
Tex-Mex Chicken & Rice Casserole
Smoky Black Bean & Rice Stoup
Chili-mac
Chicken Tetrazini

I tried to follow the general plan from the cookbook: do all the prep work first, group similar cooking items together, assemble meals while others are cooking/cooling. It seemed so simple. Boy was I wrong!

First of all, trying to follow a plan that was really more a general idea than a plan did not work so well. I found myself flitting from dish to dish without really accomplishing anything. I would get to a point where I was supposed to add such and such only to realize that I had forgotten to chop it. I ran out of pots and pans several times since I had not planned around what pans I had and at what stage of cooking I would need them. To put it simply, it was a mess.

I spent the entire day cooking 12 fairly simple meals. By fairly simple I mean that some of them simply involved making a marinade (home-made Jerk sauce...yum!) and dumping it in a freezer bag with the meat. The dishes were piled up, the kitchen was a mess, I was completely frazzled, but the freezer was full. I was proud of myself for accomplishing what I set out to do and I was pretty sure I would not be doing it again. There was no way it was worth it.

Again...boy was I wrong! That month my daughter got sick and needed a lot of extra attention. If it weren't for that freezer full of meals we would have been eating take out until she got better. Then my husband and I caught it and again I was so glad I had meals already prepared. By the end of the month I decided that maybe it was worth the headache after all. I decided to try again in March, this time by the book.