Cook Once, Enjoy Three Great Meals

Does this seem like a terribly daunting task? I promise you it isn't! This article is all about one of my favorite money and time saving cooking secrets ever. It is one of the main secrets to my frugal success in the kitchen, and it is all about double, triple, or even quadruple cooking batches.

The concept is very simple. What I am talking about here is not actually the entire meal, only the main meat item. When you cook something that's expandable, cook at least twice as much of it as you need for your immediate meal and set the extra aside to be used for future meals. Obviously, you cannot do this with every single dish you prepare, but there are a myriad of recipes that can easily be increased. It will not take you much longer to cook twice or even three times as much. Cleanup will take just about the same amount of time and storing the extra food can be properly accomplished in almost no time.

For example, brown three of what your family uses as a meals worth of ground beef and freeze the extra servings in two separate storage bags. Then you have that "meat money" in your freezer bank to use later to make Sloppy Joes, chili, spaghetti meat sauce or shepherd’s pie in a jiffy.

Do the same with cooked chicken. Either shred it or cube it after cooking and then bag it up in your family size portions to make countless chicken meals including casseroles, tacos, burritos or Cobb salads.

While your chicken is roasting, dice up several cups of onions, and bag and freeze them by 1/2 or 1-cup measures, also. No more worrying about dicing onions every time you cook because all you will have to do is take out a bag of the frozen onions and thaw in the microwave for 25 seconds before adding them to your recipe.

This cooking approach will save you time and money because:
You save time by cooking once and serving two or more times.
You will save on your utilities bills by doing the longer cooking only once. This will also help keep your kitchen cooler during the summer.
You will save grocery money by buying larger cuts and packages of meat.
You can buy less expensive cuts of meat because you will be cooking it for a longer period of time but only cooking the longer time once.

Be sure to use freezer safe bags, and label them with the date you cooked the item. Once you get in the habit of doing this, you will wonder how you ever got by without having such a terrific stockpile of cooked foods waiting for you to turn them into meals, in your own freezer. Healthier and much less expensive than eating out. You can easily customize any idea I have given you to fit your families’ tastes, for example, if most of the recipes you would use onions in would also have chopped green peppers in them, by all means, do those ahead also, and mix them in with the onions to freeze. These tips are now yours to run with. Enjoy!