What is OAMC?

OAMC, (Once A Month Cooking), is a way of cooking a months worth of food over a weekend. There are a number of web sites (and books) that teach you how to shop, cook and freeze your meals using the OAMC method.

Click on a few of the links below to view some of these sites:

• FrugalMom.net: This site has lots of recipes, directions on how to freeze the food and some very good grocery shopping tips.

• Once A Month Cooking World: Nice site with lots of information and recipes.

• Menus for Moms: Has a pyramid that shows you various levels of OAMC.

Ok, so have I tried OAMC? Not exactly, though I am going to try to set aside enough time on a weekend to experiment with this method.

What I do is to try to cook certain things that I can freeze and reuse at a later time, for example, spaghetti sauce, chili and soup. Last week when I made a Spaghetti Bolognese sauce ( you won't believe how good this sauce is) I doubled the recipe so I would have enough left over sauce for two additional meals.

I froze the left overl sauce so it would be ready for me to pull out and reuse. When I reuse this sauce I will use the sauce in a number of different ways. The first time I served this sauce we had it over spaghetti, the next time I use it I will make a spinach and ricotta cheese manicotti (I will post the recipe for this dish tomorrow). Since I have enough frozen sauce for one more meal I might make a baked Ziti dish (ook for this recipe tomorrow) as a third dish. You get the idea.

When I make chili I freeze the left over and use it in a tamale pie recipe (this recipe will be posted later this week). With the soup I usually use the frozen left overs as a side dish rather then a whole meal.

So, if you want to use your time and left overs efficiently try to double your recipe, serve one portion and then freeze the other portion to use when you don't have the time to cook from scratch.

Hope you like the ideas today!