Once a Week Cooking

We’ve all seen the web sites that promote once-a-week or once-a-month cooking, leaving you with oodles of free time and a plethora of well-planned, healthy dinners that everyone in your family loves and looks forward to. And then there’s the real world—the world with changing schedules, picky eaters and not nearly enough time to prepare all of these carefully labeled concoctions and neatly stack them in your regularly re-organized, inventoried freezer.

For those who can accomplish that feat, the more power to you. The rest of us bow humbly at your feet and pray for a plan that leaves us relatively well-fed without running through the drive through every day.

An alternative is to spend a few hours each week doing what I like to call “pre-cooking.” Pre-cooking is basically just that—getting things more or less ready to go, but not quite finishing the cooking process, making things easy to have ready to go for the week, without tying you down to a hard and fast strict schedule. Instead of planning out every single meal, I stick with just the evening meal and try to get through only the work week. I plan meals for Monday through Wednesday, and Thursday becomes “refrigerator buffet” day. What is “refrigerator buffet,” you ask? That’s the day when everyone gets to choose from the leftovers from the first three days of the week, and those leftovers become Thursday’s dinner.

The easiest way to begin this is to write a list of the meals your family will actually eat—no pie-in-the-sky ideals here, just favorites that please most of your family most of the time. To make these easy to prepare during the week, I try to stick with casseroles, slow cooker meals, soups and easy to assemble dishes like tacos. If at all possible, involve your family in this process. Have each family members choose the meals from your list they enjoy (or will at least eat) to give you an idea of which meals to include most often.

Once your list is compiled, you can choose a few meals that you’d like to make for the week. Whenever possible, I try to find a few common ingredients in a few of the meals. For example, if I’m going to chop an onion, it’s just as easy to chop a couple of them. If I’m going to brown a pound of hamburger, I may as well brown a few. This makes the work go much more efficiently.

I usually set aside a few hours on Sunday to prep the week’s food. It can be a challenge to fit it in, but the time it frees up on busy weeknights makes it well worth it. The reason casseroles work especially well is because they are easy to assemble and have ready to pop in the oven by whoever happens to get home first on a given weeknight. These are especially nice to have when a majority of the family will be home for an evening meal-otherwise plating meals and having them ready to pop in the microwave works well too. Slow cooker meals are wonderful for nights when everyone is on a different schedule. By investing in a slow cooker with a timer—the kind that changes your temp from low or high to “warm” after the cooking time—you can have dinner hot, fresh and ready for each person to serve themselves as they walk in the door.

They involve a little more individual prep time, but easy-to-assemble meals like tacos or spaghetti are nice because they can work well on nights on either kind of night. By having the ingredients ready to go, with only a minor ingredient left to cook (heating up the pre-cooked taco meant or boiling spaghetti noodles to go with homemade sauce, for example), family members can quickly put together a meal without having to start from scratch.

Soups and chilis are great go-tos because it can be prepared entirely in advance and stored in the refrigerator until someone is ready to heat up a bowl—or the entire pot, if everyone is actually able to eat together.

One key to making this plan work is to make sure each meal is labeled—a piece of scratch paper taped to a lid is just fine. Include basic information (for example, “bake uncovered for 30 minutes” on a casserole or “turkey noodle soup—heat in microwave”), so everyone knows what has to be done during the week.

To try to keep things on track, post a list on the fridge or a bulletin board listing what meals are for which day, and that Thursday is “refrigerator buffet.” Not only does this keep everyone on the same page, it ends the question “What’s for dinner?” The great thing is, you can change the list if your week changes, but it gives you somewhere to start.

You may find that once you start getting organized, you have the springboard to go on to more serious once-a-week or once-a-month cooking. Of course, feel free to invite the rest of us over that point so we can revel in your culinary glory!