Cooking your family’s meals is a daily activity throughout the year that can be a significant stressor if you have a tight schedule. Running here, there, and everywhere in the evenings can leave us all a little time crunched when it comes to putting dinner together, and makes you want to hit the drive-through–an unhealthy and costly habit.

But you don’t have to spend an hour in the kitchen every evening cooking dinner. Just imagine being able to put a casserole or a stew in the refrigerator to thaw every evening for the next night’s dinner. Your cooking can be that easy, if you jump on the “freezer cooking” bandwagon.

Freezer cooking has become popular in recent years, as families’ schedules become more and more stuffed. There are many different strategies to freezer cooking, but the most popular is to put together 30 days worth of meals in one day to freeze–otherwise known as the Once a Month Cook.

It might sound overwhelming to think of putting together 30 meals in one day, but it doesn’t have to be. First, remember that they don’t have to be 30 different meals. You can repeat the same meal 3 or 4 times, saving you time and still giving your family variety. You can also cook common ingredients all at once to use in several recipes, such as browned ground beef, sautéed onions, chopped vegetables, etc. Rather than spending time chopping and browning when you are assembling each individual recipe, do it all at once. To make this easier, choose recipes that have a lot of common ingredients.

In part 2 of this series of posts, we’ll look at the specific steps to creating an organized cooking day that will save you time and money all month long.