In a bid to improve my health and stop spending so much money on food that I simply end up throwing out when it spoils. My lifestyle is generally not a healthy one - lots of late nights, early morning, bad broken sleep (when I can get to sleep), eating on the run so mainly fast food and easy meals - but I am looking to improve it. Eating better by eating more vegetables and eating more cooked meals, not fast food, is a start but with the little amount of time I tend to have when I rush home and then rush out again. I also need to improve the quality of the lunches I am having at work, as well as start eating some sort of breakfast/morning snack.
So seeing some books about Feeding the Freezer, Frozen Assets and Once a Month Cooking, I decided this would solve my problem fairly quickly. Unfortunately the books are not so affordable and most include only a small chapter on how to adapt the method for singles. (Yes, I live alone and it is often not the sunshiny ride that people tend make it out to be.)
After some long chats to my mother about how to get this to work, we unearthed her old Freezer Cooking books and I made up a plan for my first weekend cooking sprint. I learnt a lot of things that weekend.
1. There are a lot of suggested foods that I simply wont eat.
2. Shopping after Pub Night (read: slightly sozzled) is not recommended.
3. I vastly over-estimated the size of my freezer.
4. I vastly under-estimated just how much 1kg of rice actually expands to.
I am now at the end of the month and preparing for the next one and upon investigating my freezer have discovered that my planning was perhaps a bit too much as I still have a freezer mainly half full of food. This could be partly to me not eating quite as much I should be - definitely when it comes to the veges. BUT this is a good thing as it will help me plan better for next month.
April's menu included the following:
4 portions pasta with tomato relish
4 portions pasta with tomato, onions and fried mixed peppers
6 portions mac-cheese with baby tomatoes
6 portions cottage pie with sunshine (butternut) mash
4 portions chicken in honey mustard sauce
4 portions corn fritters
4 portions corn
8 portions mixed vege
8 portions cut beans
8 portions broccoli
8 portions savory rice
This may seem like a lot but I was only working on dinners for 5 days out of 7 and lunches over the weekends too. So 30 meals with a few spare for drop-in friends.
I am thinking stews for the month ahead as the weather is getting colder here and I am wanting comfort food for the long dark nights head. With this in mind the veges left over can be reincorporated into the meals for the month ahead. I tend to eat more vege when it is incoporated into a meal than on its own but I am also considering looking at vegetarian meals so as to continue to up my vegetable intake.
I do need better containers to do this better as some of the portions came about a bit smaller than I intended but this method will definitely work for me.