Once a Month Cooking Cook Book Review

Summary: The food tasted good, but still took more prep work the night you were going to eat it than I would have liked. I did not find it possible to finish all the cooking in one day. The food may not be to everyone's taste. This is a fantastic idea and a good implementation and a great introduction to a style of cooking that will free you from a daily 45 minutes in front of the stove and another 30 on clean up. Recommended, but also consider similar books to see if they would be more to your liking and preferred style.

I bought the book Once a Month Cooking while pregnant with my first child. My plan was to have a freezer full of meals so once he was born I wouldn't have to think about food - just take something out of the freezer, warm it up, and eat it.

The book has a good layout - it offers three two-week eating plans and two one month eating plans. For these plans it tells you everything you need for your shopping list, all the staples and appliances you will need, and breaks up cooking and prep work and assembly into easy step-by-step instructions.

The book says you are supposed to make your shopping trip on one day, prepare for cooking day on another day (by getting our all your stuff and even cooking a few things that need to be cold on cooking day), and then do the rest of your cooking and assembly on another day. It is a LOT of work to do all at once, or even in three days.

I was not able to finish all the cooking in one day. I think I took almost four days to finish, but then I was 9 months pregnant and had to rest and sit down a lot. Actually, it's a good idea to sit down to do as much of it as possible, pregnant or not.

I found the cooking easy to do and I liked all of the meals (but then I weeded out the few meals I didn't think I would like beforehand - I did not buy the supplies or cook them). I did find that a few things required more prep work on the eating day than I would have liked. For example, there is a mexican stroganoff recipe that calls for heating the meat mixture (that you already cooked) in a saucepan and adding some ingredients, plus cooking the egg noodles for it on the day you plan to eat it. Now to me, why did I bother pre-cooking anything if I still have to do this much work and dirty this many dishes on the actual day? I have found that noodles freeze and thaw wonderfully when mixed with something, so these days I probably would cook it all beforehand and take my chances.

The best thing for me about the once a month cooking plan, was that on the night I sealed the last meal and stuck it in the freezer, my water broke 4 hours later and labor started. It's like my brain told my body: 'OK, we're ready for the baby now'. Oh, and I also like that I figured out that you could freeze way more things than I ever thought you could, and it gave me the impetus to come up with my own meal planning strategy: the busymeals system.