Having Food Available for when I'm Working

As previously posted, my worst case scenario with the Dispatch job is having a call come in as I'm preparing, or getting ready to prepare, a healthy dinner for my family. So I am changing some things around at home, and putting together what the OAMC (Once A Month Cooking) crowd calls mini sessions. I am unwilling to resort to commercially available convenience foods. They are loaded with preservatives and other unhealthy offerings that I just don't want my kids consuming!

Now I don't know a whole lot about OAMC. I do know that it is based on the book Frozen Assets by Deborah Taylor-Hough, which I just ordered through Ebay. While I won't be doing the traditional Once A Month Cooking, where you prepare a month's worth of meals all in one marathon session, I will be doing a continuing series of mini-sessions, which will give me both lunches for DH and ready to eat meals that only need to be heated. I created an inventory sheet, so that I can make sure the meals get used before their tastiness expires. I'm guessing, in a few months, I'll have a week or so each month where the dinner menu is superceded by the frozen meals that need to be used up.

Now, the theory behind OAMC is that if you concentrate all of your efforts into one or two days' worth of work, you can spend more time with the family on a daily basis. Bigs and middles would be helpers during the time you are preparing meals. I don't, however, know if this would work for most large families. We, by society standards, are a large family. But by large family standards, we are small, LOL. However, I don't see my freezers fitting 30 days' worth of meals, and I'm sure larger families would have the same issues. Plus, there's still considerations to be made. In attempts to freeze food when it was bought on sale, and for DH's lunches, I've learned a few things: Some foods just don't freeze very well, and, without a microwave, some foods don't reheat very well.

There is a yahoo group for OAMC (there's probably more than one, but I was already familiar with this one. There are some good recipes in there, and some mini sessions in the files. If this is something you're interested in doing occasionally, this group is a great place to start.

So, what I'm going to do, is put together several mini sessions. We will be shopping for two weeks at a time, and on the day I'm not shopping, I will be cooking instead. I'm going to do this instead of the food assignments mentioned in the chore lists. DH will be here to play with the littles, so Aimee, Nikki and Roan can help with the food prep, which they enjoy doing anyway. Each week, I will buy another pan or two so that I can bake several things at a time. Right now I can do 30 muffins at once, two loaves of bread, two large casseroles and two smaller ones. I have several cookie sheets, and one pie plate. I simply line them with aluminum foil, cook what I'm going to cook, let it cool, put the pan into the freezer, and let it freeze completely. Then I pull it out, turn it upside down on another piece of aluminum foil and let it "fall out" onto the other piece of foil. Then I can wrap it and stick it back in the freezer. Of course this won't work for stuff that would go into a microwave, unless you're going to thaw it first. But with stuff like bread, or smaller portions, those would be packaged differently anyway.

So as I get my mini-sessions put together, I will post them here.