Basic Principles of Bulk Cooking

Plan, plan, plan

In order to start cooking you will need to know:

• what your goals are- do you want dinners in the freezer or do you want to have some breakfasts, lunches and dinners

• what your family likes to eat so that you can choose recipes that will be eaten not stored forever in the freezer

• what food you have on hand in your pantry so you can use it

• what tools you have on hand

• what's on sale at your local stores

• what recipes/ meals you plan on making

• what (if any) tools or supplies you need to buy or borrow

• what food you need to buy

• what freezes well

• what to do on "prep day" 

• what you'll be doing on your cooking day(s)

• what meal you are planning on eating on your prep day and your cooking day(s)- you will want these to be easy crock pot meals if at all possible

Do like tasks at the same time

If you are browning 5 pounds of ground beef, why not brown 10 pounds or 20 pounds? The pan and spatula are already going to be dirty and your stove top will be splattered with grease. Why not cook all 20 pounds at the same time and then clean up once after ALL the ground beef is browned. (Or better yet, try boiling your ground beef! I was a skeptic, too, but it really tastes the same and is much easier, too.) If you are grating vegetables in the food processor, why not grate carrots for carrot cake and zucchini for zucchini bread and just rinse the food processor blade and bowl in the middle? You get the idea, right?

Don't refreeze thawed meat

This one is pretty self explanatory- if you heave meat that is frozen or buy meat that is frozen then you de-frost it you MUST cook it before re-freezing for safety reasons. It doesn't matter if the meat was thawed accidentally in a power outage or intentionally- you must cook it if it got thawed. However, this doesn't hold true for other foods, just meat!

Thaw your meals in the refrigerator

Every night before you go to bed or first thing in the morning choose the meal for your next dinner and place it in the refrigerator. Thawing meals in the refrigerator is the safest AND it will save you a few pennies by cooling your refrigerator as it thaws. If you forget to thaw the night before or early in the morning, then use your microwave to thaw a meal- don't place it on the counter for safety reasons. If you KNOW that it is hard for you to remember to get a meal out the night before or if you have a hard time choosing the next night's meal, you might want to try and cook meals that can go straight from freezer to oven- there are a number of them around!! (You can thaw non-meat dishes on a countertop.)

When in doubt- throw it out!

If you aren't sure if a food is still good, don't take any chances with food poisoning- throw it away!!

Package your food for the freezer well

To avoid freezer burn you will want to package your food for the freezer very carefully. Ziploc Freezer bags, Saran Wrap, freezer paper and generic freezer bags are what I use (in order of preference). Find out what you like the best and how you like to package your meals then buy quality supplies and take the time to package your food well or you may end up with freezer burn. I prefer to use Ziploc bags but some people like to freeze their meals right into a casserole dish and wrap it with Saran Wrap or place it into a 2 gallon size Ziploc. I find that takes too much room and I don't have 20-30 casserole dishes to spare!! Tupperware is another popular alternative.

Label, label, label!!!

Use a Sharpie pen on your Ziploc bags, invest in freezer tape or freezer stickers from Tupperware but DO label your meal with the contents and the date it was frozen. I know that you think you'll be able to recognize that meal 2 months from now but trust me, you won't recognize it when you have a freezer full of frozen meals that look just like it!

Manage your recipes

Get a system that you like and gather all your recipes into one place. If there is a recipe that you like to double, triple, quadruple or more write out the recipe in the larger form to eliminate math errors on a busy cooking day.  I LOVE the 30 Day Gourmet Freezer Cooking Manual and it has a great blank form for you to place your own recipes in and create multiple batches. If you own a cooking software program let it do the math for you and print out a copy of the recipe in the size you plan to make in your session. (I like to make multiples of 6.)

Cook once eat twice or Cook once, eat three or four times!

Never cook just one meal at a time. As long as you are getting your dishes dirty, either 1) make a double, triple or quadruple batch of a meal, 2) create planned leftovers, 3) chain cooking, 4) master mixes or 5) precook meat for use in a quick and easy dish that will be made "fresh" the night it is eaten.