For weeks and months – maybe even years – I’ve read about women who do once-a-month cooking, or bake for the week/month, or make up ten freezer meals in an afternoon. I’ve always wanted to try something like this, but could never get all the ingredients together to do it all at once.

Well, today everything came together. We were out of bread – regular and diet. I had three small chickens and about 5 pounds of hamburger that needed to be cooked. Four zucchinis waited to be grated up. My husband asked for a batch of pickled eggs, plus he was out of his favourite coconut macaroon.

So I made myself a list of what I wanted to accomplish and started in. Total work time was probably about five hours spread out between seven this morning and about 4:30 this afternoon. It never felt difficult or tiring. I cleaned as I went so the kitchen stayed relatively nice looking.

Here was my original list of what I hoped to do:

• bread – 4 loaves
• zucchini muffins
• almond muffins
• start “E” bread*
• country muffins?*
• grate zucchinis
• meatloaf x2
• cook ground hamburger
• boil chickens
• macaroons
• pickled eggs
• tuna salad for Tuesday night supper*

The items with an * didn’t get done. I may yet start the dough for the “E” bread tonight. It will only take about five minutes, and I ground the flour up already. The “country muffins” were a new recipe I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do or not, and the salad for Tuesday night wasn’t done because I changed my mind about what I want for supper tomorrow night.

I had three small chickens that I boiled up. The children took the meat off the bones. It was enough for 4 meals. Then I threw the bones back into the water the chickens were cooked in and cooked them some more. I got enough chicken broth for eleven dishes. I lay the bags of broth flat on a cookie sheet when they freeze they are easy to stack. In the past three days I have grated enough zucchini for 33 batches of chocolate zucchini muffins. ☺

So here are some pictures of the fruit of my labour. It was fun. I want to do this again sometime. If I’m more organized about what the children can do to help, we can get everything done a lot quicker. They helped a little today, but mostly I wanted to work alone to get a feel for what I was doing.

It’s a good feeling to know that I have some base ingredients ready to go for suppers as well as a meatloaf for sometime when I’m busy. We ate one for supper tonight.

Most of the baked goods don’t have a long shelf life though. A dozen zucchini muffins are gone already. The macaroons are packaged up for my husband’s lunches and by Wednesday – Thursday at the latest – I’ll be baking bread again.

All in all, this is definitely something I want to try again.