The Freezer Cooking Manual from 30 Day Gourmet: A Month of Meals Made Easy [Paperback]

It makes perfect sense to devote a little extra time on the weekend to building up a store of meals in the freezer. Why didn't I think of this before?

I liked the authors' approach to laying out the planning and preparation for the big cooking day. There is a lot of great information here on freezing and batch cooking. Great worksheets and checklists to help you get organized.

However, I must say that the recipes are not to my family's taste. Maybe it's a regional thing (we live in Southern California), but these recipes seem kind of 1960s and bland to us. (Cream of chicken soup is featured in several of them. Well, my Mom used that in her casseroles, but I don't!) Maybe it's because the recipes are aimed at kids. (We have none.)

We prefer recipes with more spices and variety (I cook a lot of Thai, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese dishes). However, I do not regret buying this book. All the info other than the recipes is very helpful and make this book worthwhile. I've simply adapted my own recipes to this plan.

One last note--most people won't care about this, I know, but I've been in the documentation business for 30 years, so I do. The format of the book is slightly amateurish. Although easy to read, the charts look hand-drawn, and the fonts and page layout look like someone put it together in Microsoft Word. I would expect something a little more polished for my money.

As others have pointed out, the website is great and you get a lot more recipes there. The jerk porkchop recipe is fabulous, and the parsley parmesan chicken is really good. That said, a few of the recipes in the manual are misses. The chicken enchiladas are really bland, and we are not fond of the taco rice. This is not gourmet or fancy restaurant cooking, but it is good, every day food. They are not all casseroles, and they do not rely on unusual or expensive or premade ingredients. I use many of my own recipes for family favorites as well.

I think that believing you can accomplish all this in one day is a little misleading. Really you have about two days in it by the time you count time to plan, shop, and prep, but all but the cooking day is done in smaller amounts of time. Save your tally worksheets. A year later you can make the same group of recipes again, and it will save you a lot of planning time. We generally planned one day early in the week. We just picked out the recipes, and went over what we had on hand. One of us would do all the tallying and make out the shopping list. The other would shop on Thursday. We would prep (chopping veggies, stewing chickens, etc.) separately on Friday, then put it all together on Saturday.

My cooking partner and I regularly cooked 24-26 meals for each of our families (4 kids and 2 hubbies) for $200 or less. That's only $100 each and less than $5 per entree. If you can pull that money out of your budget all at once, you will really save in two ways: 1)You will eat out much less, and 2) you will become much more aware of bargains. Believe me, when you go buy 20 pounds of boneless, skinless, chicken breasts, you start watching for those $1.49 sales rather than spending the $3.89 you might otherwise when you go to buy one package at a time. If you have your meals paid for and in the freezer, you have the money to go out and buy all the chicken you need for next time when it's on sale, but you don't have to eat chicken all week because it's on sale. And you will have a much better idea of the quantity to buy so that none of it gets lost to freezer burn, yet you have what you need.

The entrees themselves don't take much room at all if you put them in ziplock bags and freeze them flat. Don't whine about the cost of the bags! You will save it in other places and you can buy those on sale, too.

This method saves so many dishes each night, and you can pick out exactly what you want to eat. It is absolutely invaluable if you are about to have a baby or are planning a move (as long as it's not too long a distance to get your food there safely.) We otherwise would have eaten out nearly every meal for a while.