cosmicdaisy said:Have you thought about Once a Month Cooking? This would require you making casserole type dishes more than not and we are really a meat and veggies kind of family, so this doesn't work for us...but I know for others its not only a money saver in many ways (saves on cooking expense too) but a time saver.
HTH
Nicolepa said:This is not true. I have been doing OAMC for 7 years and my husband will not eat casseroles. I do a lot of dump chicken & dump beef recipes. Lasagna, spaghetti sauce, ground beef (for tacos, homemade hamburger helper etc). I feed my family of 4 for about $400 a month. If he would eat casseroles I could probably get it down a lot more but we have beef, bonless skinless chicken breasts etc. The key is to only buy meat on sale. I rarely buy anything if it isn't on sale, and preferably have a coupon too. It is rare for me not to save 50% on my groceries (a lot of times it's 70-80%)

nicola said:Nicolepa, I am assuming that this once a month idea involves cooking in bulk and freezing individual meals? Can you elaborate on some recipes?
cosmicdaisy said:I am not sure what dump beef or chicken is....but thank you for posting! Everyone I have ever talked to and recipes I have seen have been mostly stuff we wouldn't eat in our family.
Nicolepa said:It's just putting a marinade on your meat before freezing. You "dump" everything into the bag and then freeze. I put away a month of meat in a couple of hours with dump recipes. Like I said before, I prefer to cook my food the day of, but this way I always have a variety of meats/marinades to cook on any given day and I don't have to worry about marinading it the day before/ morning of. When I take it out of the freezer it marinades as it thaws.