30 Meals in One Day

Yesterday was one big cooking day! Eve, I, and the kids prepared "30 meals in one day"! Yes, that's right we prepared 30+ meals (almost 40 this time, actually) using 15 recipes from a book called Dinner is Ready, 30 meals in one day (http://tinyurl.com/7kyv7jd), which Eve's sister, Beth Anne, sent to us this last Christmas. The idea of the book is to show you how you can prepare 30 meals in one mega cooking day, freeze them, and then thaw them to cook throughout the next month in order to allow families to eat nice, freshly cooked meals on days with hectic schedules that wouldn't normally allow for preparing a fancy meal. We did it once back in January and it was really nice almost every day for Eve to be able to pick a meal, stick it in the oven an hour, and then have something nice for the family to eat.

We had started getting tired of our normal slate of meal ideas, and this has certainly added more variety and higher quality food to our daily menus, without requiring us to eat out more. Some of the recipes we tried this time were: Beef Stroganoff, Bacon Meatloaf, Bacon Chicken, Ham n' Cheese Roll-ups, Meatloaf and Potatoes, Taco Soup, Tortilla Chicken, Clam Chowder, etc. There's 150 of these special freezer recipes in the book, so we look forward to trying out lots more of them. And though it does require setting aside a whole day of preparing and cooking (plus the buying the day before), it actually turns out to be a fun family event to plan for and then carry out. So, if you're struggling to prepare the type of meals you really want with the daily schedule you have, then this might be a recipe book worth checking out.