Batch Cooking

Well, I've done it again!! This past weekend, me and my friend Missy batch cooked. Every time I talk about it people ask what on earth batch cooking is! Well, it's two days of planning, shopping, cutting, prepping, boiling, cooking, cutting, sealing, laughing, pouring, measuring, stirring, laughing, eating fun!!! Ok, I'll be more specific. Here's a run down of what we do or at least what we did this weekend. I'm sorry I don't have pictures to go with this post. I really meant to take them, but when you're in the middle of a 23 hour cooking marathon, you kind of forget to snap a few pictures here and there.

Day 1: We started out at Starbucks, notebooks in hand, and chose the recipes we wanted to do. We have compiled about 40 recipes, so we go through them and pick out the ones we want to do. This time we picked out about 32 recipes!! That may not sound like a lot, but we do each recipe X 4. Two for her family and two mine. We go through each recipe and make our shopping list. We try to stay organized (dairy, canned, frozen, baking, spices, etc.) so that shopping will go smoothly. As soon as we had our list together we headed to Sam's!! We always start at Sam's because we buy so much in bulk and definitely get the best deals there. For example, we needed 156 chicken breasts for our recipes, so we needed 13 bags of chicken breasts. Not to mention the 20 something pounds of ground beef, 4 roasts, 4 briskets, and 6 pounds of stew meat! Two huge cart fulls and 700something dollars later, we headed to Wal-Mart! We found pretty much everything else we needed at Wally World. One last stop at Market Street for lunch and two miscellaneous items we couldn't get at the other stores and then back to Missy's for cooking!!

Missy and I have come up with a pretty good system even though this was only our second time to cook together! We've both batch cooked with other people before so we've learned a lot of things that work and a lot of things that don't. Missy is the prep master!! She goes through the recipes and figures out how many chicken breasts need to be cooked, how many pounds of meat need to be browned, what veggies need to be chopped. I start putting together the "raw" recipes. Raw recipes are ones that don't require the protein to be cooked. These meals just require assembly. So Day 1 is always packed! Planning, shopping, prepping, raw recipes, and 13 hours later we were done.

Day 2: Assembly day!!! All of the prep work that Missy did the day before now gets put into the remaining recipes. We just each pick different ones and start putting them together until it's all done. Now let me just say that we are what I would call "extreme" batch cookers!! Before cooking with Missy I had only made about 20 recipes at a time and that wasn't doubling them, just 20 meals for my family. Missy has such an amazingly organized system, that with just a little bit more time that I was putting in before I am coming home with triple the amount of recipes! My freezer is packed with 66 meals!! The great thing about that is I don't have to cook for a few months!!! If you don't have the freezer space for 66 meals, you can cook on a much smaller scale, and it is still so worth it. Batch cooking makes my life SOOOO much easier! It is two packed days, but it is so worth it.

If you are interested in more info about it, or have any questions, let me know! I love sharing information with other moms and wives or even single ladies that just want to make their lives a little easier, and batch cooking does that for me!!! Again, sorry there are no pictures! I promise to post some pictures of some of the meals as we eat them. I will also share some recipes. I have batch cooking notebooks available for $5 is you want one. They have about 35 recipes in them along with some really great tips sheets and helpful information. Hope you feel inspired to get in the kitchen and start cooking!!!