May : Month 3 (I'm getting better)

Despite the various disasters, April's cooking day went relatively well. Having a game plan really helped, the two-week cycle ended up being the right amount of food for my family, and we discovered some new family favorites.

I made the decision to repeat the same cycle for a second month. This time I made sure that my husband knew just what was on the shopping list before sending him off to the store. I also made sure he was home to help prevent the spillage of the last cooking day. With his help I managed to get everything put together with very little trouble. We even made enchiladas with the pork leftover from the month before! As an added bonus, ribs were on sale buy 1, get 2 free and pot roasts were buy one, get one free...SCORE!

At the end of the day my freezer was packed with a month's worth of meals and then some. It was a tight fit with the extra meat but we managed to make it work. At this point I started thinking that it might not be a bad idea to invest in a separate freezer. I hate passing up a good meat sale (and we did pass up some other good deals this month) just because I'm out of space.

After 3 months of freezer cooking I really felt like a had a good grip on the processes involved and I started looking for ways to expand. Up to this point I had only done dinners, but what about lunches and easy side dishes? I searched out another freezer cookbook, this time one with different freezing techniques and a different selection of recipes. I finally settled on "Don't Panic, Dinner's in the Freezer." I also decided to try to create my own "cycle" for month 4. I liked the way my first cookbook broke everything down into simple steps, I loved some of the recipes, but we were really missing some of our previous monthly staples. I set the goal of creating my own monthly meal plan, complete with charts, shopping lists, and processing instructions.