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How Bulk Cooking Can Save You Money

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Have you ever had a day where everything went wrong?  The kind of day where you have a meeting at 4 p.m. and think it will end at 5 p.m., but it runs an hour late?  Then you get home, the kids are cranky and hungry.  You still have to help them do their homework, but you have nothing ready for a quick meal?  Most people accept defeat and order take out.  That’s what I used to do years ago, but then I discovered bulk cooking, and I started saving both time and money!

Bulk Cooking

How Bulk Cooking Works

There are several ways to incorporate bulk cooking into your life.  Just choose the style that you like the best.

Make Meals in Advance

One way to try bulk cooking is to make several meals on one day.  Ideally, you’ll pick four to five recipes and at least double each recipe.  Then, you’ll take the eight to ten meals that you made, put them in a freezer bag, lay them flat, and freeze them.  In the future, when you have a busy night, simply grab a meal from the freezer instead of calling for take-out.

Some people who are extremely motivated make enough meals in one day for their family to eat for a month!  However, I wouldn’t recommend this for a beginner because it can be exhausting.  You spend an entire day cutting up produce, batch cooking, and cleaning up.  The reward is that for the next 30 days, you don’t have to worry about what’s for dinner.

Prep Food for the Week

If you’re intimidated by the idea of making entire meals in advance, you can start more slowly with meal prep for the week.  Doing this on a Sunday will still save you a lot of time during the week and make your actual cooking time faster.

Bulk Cooking
Photo by Ella Olsson on Unsplash

When you do this type of bulk cooking, you simply prep all the ingredients that you will need for the week.  For instance, if you know you’re making chili during the week, brown the ground beef and soak and cook the beans now.  Then, on Wednesday night, chili night, just pull the precooked beef and beans from the refrigerator and combine on the stove and let simmer.  You’ll easily skim 20 to 30 minutes off your cooking time by doing this.

There is one caveat to this way of preparing food.  If you prep food on Sunday, you may need to freeze some portions that you’ll use later in the week because the food won’t stay fresh until the end of the week.  I love to take out two pounds of ground beef on the weekend, brown it down, and then store it in the freezer in smaller size portions.  Whenever I need it, I just pull it out for the recipe I’m making.

Where to Find Recipes

Not all foods freeze well, so it’s best to find recipes specifically for bulk cooking.  Simply Google “freezer cooking recipes” and you’ll find a slew of recipes, all designed with ingredients that freeze well.  Often times when I serve a meal, my husband can’t even tell that it’s been frozen before.

Advantages of Bulk Cooking

There are so many advantages to bulk cooking!

Choose the Ingredients

You get to choose the ingredients.  If you’re interested in eating clean or you have food allergies or intolerances, this way of cooking may be for you.  You choose how much fat or sugar you add.  You choose organic or non-organic ingredients.  Since you’re making the meal, you know exactly what you are putting in your body, which can’t be said if you order take out or buy frozen meals from the store.

Cook the Foods You Like

You have the ultimate say in the meals that fill your freezer.  You can make meals that the entire family enjoys, even the fussy little ones, which makes meal time much more pleasant for everyone. And you needn’t stop at meals – you can also cook your favorite sauces to use as an accompaniment for those blander mid-week meals where you don’t have the energy to make anything fancy. For example, take a look at this chinese hot mustard sauce recipe which is perfect both for freezing and for giving a kick to your dinner!

Save Time

Yes, bulk cooking requires an investment in time in the beginning, but you’ll soon find that it saves you so much time during the week.  Can you imagine the ease of just pulling a meal from the freezer, heating it, and making a salad to go with it?  Or, pulling out all of the meal components from your refrigerator and simply simmering them together?

How Bulk Cooking Can Save You Money
Photo by Ella Olsson on Unsplash

Plus, you make most of the mess on your bulk cooking day, so on the day when you actually eat the meal, there is very little clean up.

Save Money

This is one of the best advantages to bulk cooking.  You can save some serious money.  Let’s say you’re a busy family of four, and you grab take out costing you $40 once a week.  That’s $160 a month you could save if instead of relying on take out, you could simply have a meal defrosting in the refrigerator waiting for you to heat up on a busy night.

Plus, have you ever had weeks where you buy groceries, but then you get too busy and can’t cook as often as you had planned?  Those ingredients spoil before you can use them.  You lose $10 or $20 in ingredients you didn’t use.  With bulk cooking, that issue mostly goes away, saving you money twice.

Drawbacks of Bulk Cooking

I have been bulk cooking in some form or other for the last 15 years.  I really enjoy preparing food this way, but there are some drawbacks.

Initially Expensive

Let’s say you spend $200 a week for groceries.  If you decide at the beginning of the month that you want to make all of your dinners for the month and put them in the freezer, you may have to spend $300 or $400 to buy all of the ingredients at once.  This can be hard on your budget initially because you have to spend more upfront than you have budgeted weekly.  After that initial bulk cooking session, you’ll find that you spend less per week.

Time Consuming

When my kids were little, my husband would watch them all day so I could bulk cook for the month.  The cooking day was always exhausting, and as much as I loved having meals in the freezer for the whole month, I hated bulk cooking day.

Now that my kids are older and more self-sufficient, I bulk cook on Sunday for the upcoming week.  Rather than taking me all day, bulk cooking for the week only takes me two to three hours.

Final Thoughts

Bulk cooking is an excellent way to save money and time.  Yes, you have to initially invest money and time, but you’ll reap the rewards for days to come.

Read More

5 Strategies to Make Food at Home If You Hate Cooking,

Frugal Tools and Strategies to Help Busy Families Get Organized,

Even More Ways to Save on Groceries

5 Strategies to Make Food at Home If You Hate Cooking

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For some, cooking is a joy and a way to relax after a long, hard day. For others, cooking is a daily task that must be done to save money and fuel their bodies. And then for others, cooking is one of the worst tasks they have to do and one they avoid as much as possible by eating out, picking up food, or getting an invite to someone else’s house who is doing the cooking.

If you’re in the latter group of people, you’re not alone. However, if you utilize these five strategies to make food at home when you hate cooking, you’ll find that you’ll save a considerable amount of money on your food budget, and you’ll likely be eating better.

Pick “Dump” Meals

Sure, the name is unappetizing, but “dump” refers to meals where you just put the food in the InstaPot or slow cooker and walk away. One example might be a few chicken breasts, black beans, corn, and salsa. Cook in the slow cooker for a few hours, shred the chicken, and serve over rice.

Pinterest and YouTube have plenty of dump meals; you could make several and put some in your freezer, making dinner prep even easier.

Use Premade Food

Most stores have some type of pre-made food you can use. Down the freezer aisle, you’ll find pre-made meals for a family that you just have to put in your slow cooker or cook on the stove; all of the ingredients that you need are in the bag.

Likewise, you can buy already chopped vegetables from the salad bar and rotisserie chicken that’s already been pulled from the bone to make meal time prep faster.

Premade salad bar ingredients for people who hate to cook.

Order a Meal Kit Delivery Service

There are many meal kit delivery services available such as Blue Apron, Green Chef, and HelloFresh, to name a few, each with their own specialty. In your kit, you’ll receive all of the ingredients you need for the meals as well as a card that tells you how to make the meal. With a meal kit delivery service, you avoid the headache of grocery shopping and get to try a new meal.

Make a Few Meals in Advance on Sunday

Another option for those who hate cooking is to make a few meals on Sunday. Then, when you come home on Monday, you don’t have to cook at all. Simply pull out the meal you already made and reheat it. While you do still have to cook with this option, you only have to cook one day, and then you get several days off when you eat the meals you cooked on Sunday.

Pick Easy Meals

No one says you have to have fancy dinners. Scrambled eggs, toast, and fruit can do just fine and require minimal cooking and clean up.

Easy meals for people who don't like to cook.

If you hate cooking, don’t feel the need to resort to eating out every night. Instead, try one of these five strategies to make food at home when you hate cooking.

If you hate cooking, what strategies do you use to still eat at home but limit the amount of time you have to cook?

3 Easy Ways to Get a Home Cooked Meal on the Table: Save Time and Money

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Do you cook at home?  If so, how many times a week?

Chances are, your answer will vary depending on whether or not you work outside the home, your age, and your income.

Sure, cooking at home can save you plenty of money, but not a lot of us do it.  According to Harris Interactive, “Two in five (41%) say they prepare meals at home five or more times a week and three in ten (29%) do so three to four times a week.  One in five (19%) of U.S. adults prepare meals at home one to two times a week, and 11% say they rarely or never prepare meals at home.” There aren’t always easy ways to get a home cooked meal on the table.

In the last several years, my husband and I have made the switch to exclusively eating at home.  We go out to eat less than 10 times a year, usually only when we’re traveling.  What I’ve discovered is that cooking at home can actually be A LOT of work.  Making healthy, low-cost food requires time and energy, and then there is all of the clean up to do afterwards.  If I were still working full-time outside the home, I doubt that I would have time to cook as much as I do now.

Home Cooked Meal
Original IMG credit: DSC_0719 on Flickr

However, there are a number of strategies that can help make preparing foods at home easier.

Have a go to meal.  Everyone should have a few easy meals that they can make from staples in the pantry when they’re short on time.  Choices might include spaghetti, cheese quesadillas, grilled cheese sandwiches, etc.  These meals may not be ideal nutritionally, but they’re still better than grabbing fast food, and they’ll save your wallet.

Use your slow cooker.  Start the slow cooker in the morning, and when you come home, you’ll have a hot meal waiting for you.  To save even more time, prep all of the ingredients the night before so in the busy morning, you can just dump in the ingredients and go.

Utilize freezer cooking.  Take one day a month and cook up several meals for your family for the month.  This might take you three to four hours, but then you will eliminate much of the cooking you’ll need to do for the rest of the month.  Simply take a meal out of your freezer the night before you need it and then reheat it when you get home from work.

There are short cuts to freezer meals, too.  Search Pinterest, and you’ll find crockpot freezer meals.  Simply dump the ingredients in a freezer bag and freeze.  This type of freezer cooking doesn’t require any cooking before putting it in the slow cooker, so you can make a month’s worth of meals in about an hour.

Another idea is to double any recipe you are already cooking and put the second one in the freezer for a busy night.

Don’t be discouraged if you haven’t yet mastered how to eat at home without spending all of your time cooking.  As Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of What to Eat says, “Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all.  It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is better than none” (The New York Times).

What is your favorite strategy to get a healthy meal on the table quickly?