July 2, 2001 -- After Deborah Taylor-Hough's first child was bo
July 2, 2001 -- After Deborah Taylor-Hough's first child was born prematurely, she and her husband found themselves traveling to the intensive care nursery twice a day. "Probably what helped me most at that time is that the ladies from my church brought us two weeks' worth of frozen meals, and I didn't have to worry about what we were eating," she says.
A few years later, when her husband was working a swing shift, Taylor-Hough wanted to serve the main meal at noon, before he left. "The morning was our family time, but I also had to cook dinner then, and I felt like getting dinner ready was taking away my life," she recalls. A friend suggested she try cooking a month's food at once and storing it in the freezer.
From those small beginnings has grown a big passion. In 1998, Taylor-Hough published Frozen Assets: How to Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month, and today she has more than 2,000 people involved in her email list and online discussion group.
Bulk Cooking
Here's how it works: Once a month, she spends an hour on a Thursday night writing a shopping list. The next day, she shops. ("Never shop and cook on the same day," she advises.)
On Friday night she does the prep work, like chopping onions, grating cheese, making spaghetti sauce, and browning ground beef. On Saturday she spends a solid 6 to 8 hours cooking. By the end of the day she has a month's worth of meals in the freezer.
A big surprise for Taylor-Hough was how much money she saves. Because she was buying in bulk and eating out much less, her monthly budget for food dropped from $700 to $300 for a family of five.
Her web site is loaded with recipe ideas, cooking tips, and sample meal plans. Typical dishes include soups, meat loaf, stews, casseroles, and meat items to serve over rice.
While Taylor-Hough's first book on bulk cooking gets top marks for efficiency and price-consciousness, many recipes tend toward red meat and white flour. Her newly released sequel, Frozen Assets Lite & Easy, has more healthy, low-fat recipes, she says.
In addition, the bulk cooking system is designed chiefly for main dishes, the most time-consuming part of a meal. Of course, they should be combined with fresh fruit and salad.
Once you've grasped the basic idea of bulk cooking, you adjust it to fit your own circumstances, Taylor-Hough says. And you don't have to have a large freezer for it to work. For years, she had only a small freezer on top of the refrigerator.
"Use freezer bags, freeze them flat, and then stand them on end to make better use of your space," she says. "You can easily fit two weeks of main dishes in that space. Actually, I can do a full month."
"This is a wonderful, wonderful idea," says Lauren Groveman, who hosts a radio program on food, family, and the home. "You can plan ahead when you see a crazy week coming. When you're busiest, and feeling most tired and needy, that's the most important time to go to your own freezer and benefit from healthy, home-cooked food, instead of the drive-through line at the local fast-food place."
Many foods freeze perfectly, says Groveman, whose TV show, Cooking with Lauren Groveman, premiers this fall, especially soups, stews, and chili. "Brisket is such a tough meat it's improved by slow cooking followed by freezing. Make a big batch of stock, chill it first to skim off extra fat, and divide it into containers. When you want soups or stews you don't need to start with that powdered stuff!"
