Meet OAMM member Katharine as she shares with us from Belgium. She freezer cooks to stay sane as a full time working mom of 2 and one more on the way.
Katharine is another of our expat members who lives in Belgium. Once a month cooking helps her and her family have more free time, stay healthy and keep on budget with a minimum of effort. She works twelve-hour shifts and she and her husband are expecting their third child in March. They turned to once a month cooking three years ago while having two children under the age of two and working full-time. I love that Katharine has been meeting and learning from other members who have contributed to this series. This is what it is all about!
How long have you been once a month cooking? How did you discover OAMM?
I’ve been cooking OAM since 2011. I had been reading an online forum for busy mothers where people were talking about “OAMC” and “OAMM”, which I looked up, thinking they were internet acronyms like “LOL”– the rest is history.
What circumstance pushed you to give once a month cooking a try? How has choosing to OAMC benefited you and your family?
We turned to OAMC because if you come home from a full day of work at 6 pm after a long bike commute home and with two hungry children, you have to have something quick for dinner. Our food spending went down by about $200/month (that is US dollars), especially since we now take lunches to the office. When I began, I had just very basic materials: just twist-tie generic freezer bags and some plastic containers. Over time we reinvested the savings to buy things like a stand-alone freezer. When I work shifts, OAMC enables me to help my family even when I’m not there. The best is being confident that lunch and dinner are ready, which frees you up to do other things.
What is your favorite OAMM resource?
It’s the plug and play Menu Builder, hands down. (This is what we call “Swappable.”) For us, the Menu Builder paid back the price difference between the Basic and Pro memberships within two months, and at this rate will 100% pay for itself within a year. I am not trying to sell people anything, but in my case the Pro membership was a hyper leap in performance for my OAMC and a huge reduction in stress. You can include “throw and go” meals every month and choose family favorites so that you know everything will get eaten: less food waste, more savings, and more home cooked meals. Using one or two tried and true recipes makes your cooking day mentally easier and more motivating to finish, which again leads to less food waste because it’s easier to tackle big cooking days with a familiar recipe or two while still getting lots of monthly variety. Lindsay Hoang in her Member Spotlight gave the great suggestion to keep a notebook of your recipes and note down favorites, which makes it easy to remember which meals were winners. A nice feature to reduce the dread factor of a long cooking day is that you can remove recipes too, meaning instead of jumping between 5 dishes for the mini menu to 12 for a full menu, you can modify and create menus with 2 or 3 dishes, or 6 or 8. Tailor it to your time and energy. It puts you in control. Then you won’t end up buying more food than you end up cooking, meaning once again less food waste. The Menu Builder also enables you to shop the local sales. So if carrots or quinoa go on sale, you can include one or two dishes of each to put money back in your pocket.
(I love how Katharine has figured out the “secrets” of Menu Builder by playing around, and how she has gained inspiration from Lindsay from across the globe.)
Give us a brief introduction to your kitchen.
I live in Belgium, and European-sized homes are generally smaller than American ones, so everything is sized down proportionately. People just expect to go shopping a couple times a week, so a family fridge and freezer like ours is about 4 feet tall. Kitchens are so small, so we have a downstairs pantry like most other people do. Therefore spreading out cooking among a few days makes it so much more workable with the space available. As for setting up, I do prep work like I’m a backstage prepper for a cooking show: make everything ready to pour and mix because that’s how the pros speed up cooking.
What is the number one tip that you would give to a first timer?
Menus and recipes are manuscripts–you are the editor. Modify and substitute at will. Whatever steps you can do in advance is grace: even ten minutes of work and decision-making done for you is worth it. I break up my big cooking day as usually I can find most dry ingredients in my pantry before shopping, so over the course of a week I take ten minutes every evening to premix dry ingredients that are added at the same time in a recipe into labelled clean glass jars or bags, and tick off what I already added to the bag on the recipe. At first I thought that just ten minutes’ of work was a waste of time, why not do it all on the cooking day? But recipe mix boxes and and packets are million-dollar businesses because even little things that are done ahead are helpful. Try it and see if you like it. It can be handy to do ahead of busy times, like early or midway through a pregnancy, or months ahead of an intensive work period, because dry ingredients won’t spoil. It’s also a nice way to include children, since ten minutes is doable for even very young children.
If you run out of steam when cooking, you can convert regular recipes into soups (described below). Or if you only finish half of the prep for a recipe, you can freeze it. Note what you did on your recipe and schedule another time to finish up to remind yourself and ensure your hard work goes to use. You still got ahead and tackled half of the job. Then prep the other half and freeze in a separate bag to avoid the first one from partially thawing and going off.
Do you involve other people when you OAMC?
My children are 3 and 4 so they can do just a few basic kitchen tasks under supervision. For cook-a-thons I set them up with a new sticker coloring book or puzzle. We have family time, and it’s more cost-effective than babysitting.
We always do baking as a family activity separate from the cooking weekend. My kids love it and learn to bake, and are much more willing to eat low sugar, whole grain treats in their lunchboxes when they made them. We do the OAMM method with double or triple batches and I flash freeze muffin batter in silicone muffin forms or freeze balls of biscuit or cookie dough so they are ready to put in the oven for the “fresh out of the oven” taste. Now that our baby is coming in March, I am stocking up on premixed baking recipes in labelled jars and bags, and in January will start with freezing meals for the newborn period.
Tell us about a time when you experienced a OAMC or cooking fail.
There are no failures in cooking–just creative opportunities. After running out of steam one cooking day I converted the remaining recipes to “throw and go” style: just chucked all of the ingredients in freezer bag with a cube of bouillon, then on serving days I thawed the bags in my slow cooker, added water and called it a soup! Lasagna and taco soups are delicious, so if those recipes can be soups, you can transform almost any recipe into a soup.
How is OAMC hard? How does it make your life easy?
It would definitely be hard if I were trying to do a 12-hour cooking sessions! Between work, pregnancy and children I am tired already. But thanks to Elizabeth’s Member Spotlight, I was inspired to break the process down till it’s something that I’m eager to do to get ahead. Over time you build up practice, speed and stamina and want to take on longer cooking sessions as it’s even more time-efficient to prep and cook once than three or four times. Also try looking at the math: calculate how long it takes to cook daily, then compare that against a big cooking day. The time savings is so motivating! As for making life easier, you cook when it’s the right time for you, rather than cooking one meal at a time while tummies are rumbling. You’re also free to start and stop without worrying that you won’t get dinner on the table “on time”, because every parent with young kids is going to get interrupted. Also little helpers do better between meals when they are not famished.
What are your favorite freezer cooking tools?
So like almost every other freezer cook, I love my slow cookers, but I had to order mine from the UK and France since they are almost unknown here in Belgium! My other favorite freezer cooking tool is Google Calendar with their free SMS alerts. As soon as I create my monthly menu, I take fifteen minutes to schedule each meal on our shared family agenda. I create 7am SMS reminders to thaw food in the fridge or start up the slow cooker on serving day. If we end up eating something else for dinner, that’s fine, I just reschedule the dinner for the next day. On days when I work shifts my husband gets an SMS alert around 4pm to remind him what is for dinner, and as a result he no longer runs to the grocery store with hungry preschoolers, serving dinner late, and the following morning the kids are too tired to get out of bed. I also use the calendar to schedule shopping and cooking times, and the text message alerts to tell me to soak dried beans in advance, etc. (Using Google Calendar is such a great idea. We often have readers/members ask about how to plan to eat the meals they have stashed in the freezer. Hope Katharine’s idea inspires you!)
**Do you have a unique membership story or use OAMM in an unusual way? We would love to hear about it! Send it to info @ onceamonthmeals.com with the subject: I am OAMM. Talk to you soon!**