The Big Cook

So I don't know how many of you have hear of the The Big Cook cook book but I am planning on doing one. Basically the idea is you prepare a bunch of meals and freeze them for cooking later on. They have each recipe set up 1, 4, 6, or 8 meals and gives you the option to cook it in the oven, microwave, or slow cooker and some of them you can BBQ. Each meal feeds 4-6 people. Perfect for my family but would be perfect for anyone as you would have left overs for the next day. The idea is to get several people together to share to cost and prepare a ton of meals. I plan on doing this myself unless I end up finding someone who wants to participate in it with me. In the Appendix of the book it has 2 sample cooks. Each sample consists of 14 different recipes and a shopping list with exact amounts of ingredients to buy. The recipes are a mix of chicken, beef and pork so you get a good range of flavors. The plan is to purchase the all the spices and non perishable foods over the summer and then in the fall get all the meats, produce and dairy need to make the meals. Each cook listed makes enough suppers for 3 full months. Now for me with a large family to feed which includes hubby and 2 teenagers, one of which is a boy who will eat everything in site, plus trying to look after my other 2 children under the age of 2 and run my day home and Avon business I don't always have time to make a great meal. I plan on buying as much as I can at the dollar store to help save money on the cost. Then once I have the cook done I have 3 months to buy the ingredients for the next 14 recipe cook listed. By January of 2011 I will know out of the 28 recipes which ones to make again and I will try more of the recipes. I think this will be a cost and time saving thing to do. I will keep you up to date on it and how much it all ends up costing me. I think the most expensive things will be all the meat.