Tips for Starting a Freezer Dinner Group

Maybe you've heard of "Once a Month Cooking". This is a concept where you plan and shop for a month of meals at one time. Then, over a 1 or 2 day period you prepare all the meals and put them in your freezer. Then, through out the month, you will be able to pull a meal out of the freezer that usually just needs to be defrosted and baked, thus cutting down on daily meal preparation.

I had thought of doing this kind of cooking before. When I was weeks away from having my 3rd son, I spent a few days and was able to put 4 or 5 meals in the freezer with detailed instructions so my husband would know what to do with them. However, I was hesitant about cooking for a whole month.

Recently a company called "Dinners Ready" opened up a store in a nearby shopping center nearby. Dinners Ready is a kitchen, so to speak, where customers come to assemble meals. Customers schedule a session in advance and make their meal selections. Employees at Dinners Ready pre-chop the veggies and bring out all the ingredients you need to assemble your meals. They ask you to bring a cooler so you can safely transport your meals back to your house and put them in your freezer. For 6-11, 6-person meals, you pay $21 a meal. For 12-50 meals you pay $18 each. When you are done, you simply pack up and go home. The staff cleans up and you are left with a freezer full of expensive gourmet meals.

I tried to justify how I could possibly spend that kind of money on a meal for my family. Granted, each meal would probably last my family at least 2 dinners. I have 3 boys ages 8 and under and they aren't big eaters yet. Even with the occasional coupon that came in the mail, I still thought Dinners Ready, while a great idea, was just too much for my budget to handle.

I knew that I could make a freezer full of dinners for much less than I would pay at Dinners Ready, but I still couldn't bring myself to spend a whole weekend cooking. Suddenly, the solution came to me. Why not get 6-10 friends to make 1 meal 6-10 times. Then we have a swap, so we all end up with 6-10 different meals. I thought making one recipe multiple times would be less work than making multiple recipes only one time.

I organized a group of women in my neighborhood who were interested in doing the dinner swap. Every two months we pick a day and plan to meet that day to swap our meals. Some months we have 7 participating ladies and other months we have 10. We all get a great variety of dinners with a little bit of work.

The first month I spent about 3 hours making 7 9x13 disposable aluminum pans of baked pasta and lemon chicken. Each 6 serving pan came out to about $6. That's a lot better than $18 or $21 per meal.

On the chosen day, we met at my house with our frozen meals. Instructions for preparation were written on each container.

If you would like to try something like this with your friends or even a church group, here are some tips to remember.

• Make sure everyone knows what size meal they should make. We settled on 6 adult servings. That way, every family knows what to expect as far as serving size.

• Let the group know about any food allergies your family might have.

• Make sure each meal is labeled and includes instructions on preparing the dish.

• Do an internet search under "once a month cooking" for lots of recipes and tips on how to save time cooking large quantities of food.

• Check your library for cookbooks specifically written about freezer meals. Not every food maintains it taste and consistency when frozen.

• Consider purchasing a cookbook with freezer dinner recipes. My current favorite is "Dream Dinners" by Stephanie Allen and Tina Kuna. The recipes are tasty and a have an upscale taste. I've also heard wonderful things about "Don't Panic, Dinner's in the Freezer" by Susie Martinez.