Have you ever heard of once a month cooking?  Basically, you prepare a month’s worth of meals in one day, then stick them in the freezer and just pull one out every night.  This isn’t realistic for me because of the logistics of doing this on the scale necessary for a family of our size, but a couple of months I started doing something different with my shopping that reminds me of this basic idea.

And that is – once a month shopping!  I’ve drastically cut down on my shopping by only shopping at the beginning of the month for staples, plus once every two weeks for veggies.  This has been great!  Here’s how it works: I start the month by buying all the chicken and meat I need (whatever is on sale that week is what I use for the month).  Then when I get home I roast all of the chicken and freeze it in meal size pans.  I bag the fresh meat into meal sized portions and put that in the freezer, so I can pull out one package to prepare a meal without needing to defrost the entire family pack.  This is where the biggest part of my food expenses go.

I buy a month’s worth of eggs (around 18 – 20 dozen) at the beginning of the month, and keep it in an unheated room in the basement where they stay very cool.  This might not work as well in the summer, but for now it’s good.  I go to as many as 3 or 4 stores in two separate shopping trips within the first four days of the month, and buy lots of whatever staples they have on sale that week, so that eliminates the need to keep a weekly eye on the sales flyers.  I suppose basic staples are always on sale, because I haven’t had a problem finding what I need at sale prices on this schedule, with the exception of cheese.

As far as vegetables go, I can’t do all of that once a month for obvious reasons.  So I go twice a month.  I get about 100 lb of potatoes, a bunch of onions, and maybe 30 lb of sweet potatoes close to the beginning of the month.  Then I buy the perishable type veggies like tomatoes, peppers, cukes, and I use them within the first week after I buy them, since they don’t stay fresh very long.  I also buy lots of squash and cold weather vegetables (carrots, turnips, rutabagas, beets, turnips, parsnips, cabbage) that stay fresh longer.  These are also kept in the basement room along with the eggs.    I make some of these into jars of lacto fermented veggies, and I use these more the second and fourth weeks of the month, when the less hardy veggies are used up.  I buy several bags of romaine hearts each time and find that they easily stay for two weeks, so I use that as the basis for daily salads with whatever veggies I want to throw in.

Cabbage has become very popular here because it’s so versatile and stays fresh a long time; I can do so many things with it!  (And at 3 lb for a dollar, you can’t beat the price!)  Lacto fermented sauerkraut and cortido, coleslaw and other salads, sauteed in stir fries – today I made a lunch dish called colcannon that the kids enjoyed.

Colcannon:

Simmer 1 1/4 lb chopped green cabbage in 2 c. water and 1 T. oil.  Saute 1 c. onions/leeks in 1/2 c. butter until translucent. Add 1  1/4 lb. cooked potatoes, quartered and 1 c. milk to the potato mix and simmer it all until warm.  Then puree this mix -but I just quickly mashed it because as you know I like to save time – and add it to the cooked cabbage.  Mix it all together, season with salt and pepper and top with some more butter if you like.  Filled with protein, carbs, healthy fats, and veggies -a balanced meal and cheap to boot!

Carrots are also great – the kids like carrot sticks and I shred and then bag a large amount of carrots so I can add them to fresh salads.  This is in addition to all the other veggies they eat, but carrots are easy to always have around.

I used to shop weekly to stock up on the sales for whatever the three main supermarkets had that I wanted.  Now it’s just the main shopping the first week, two trips to the vegetable market, and that’s it for the month.  The hard part about this is that I use about two thirds  of my monthly food budget within the first few days and that leaves the much smaller amount for the remaining 27 or so days!  After years of budgeting equal amounts per week, I sometimes feel momentarily nervous.  Then I remind myself that I have lots of food and I’m certainly not going to run out before I replenish my budget.  After my shopping trip last week on the 4th, I had $7 remaining to last for eleven days (my shopping cycle begins the 15th of each month).   As meager as that sounds, my fridge, freezer and pantry are all full, even now, in the last few days before the month runs out – I have at least 50 lb of potatoes, many pounds of oats, rice, wheat, a freezer with poultry and lamb, lots of canned goods, plenty of milk, butter, and eggs, and some root veggies and lettuce so I’m nowhere near suffering any lack!

I’m very disciplined about sticking to my food budget so I don’t give myself leeway by shopping a day or two earlier or spending a penny more than I allocate each month.    I have had to raise my food budget in the last year, since staples have gone up significantly in price (and my kids keep getting bigger and bigger!), and now spend about $540 a month; that includes everything.  I choose to be disciplined, because I don’t think I could maintain my budget without this discipline.  Since I spend less than half of what is typical for a large family, I know I could easily significantly increase my monthly expenditures without having any qualitative improvement to show for it, and this discipline guards me against that.

So this new approach has benefited me by saving lots of my time, gas, and energy, leaving more time to enjoy my family, while spending the same amount as before, and feeding my family as well as ever!

Avivah