At 12:30 on Sunday afternoon I taped the plan to the cabinet above the stove, the way we used to hang tickets on the rail at the restaurant: nine dinners in cooking order, with times penciled in the margin. At 4:30 the last labeled bag went into the chest freezer and the counters were clean. Four hours, nine dinners, $118.
October is the busiest month on our calendar. Cody's last regular-season Fridays, Eli's flag football on Tuesdays and Saturdays with Matt helping coach, Wyatt's fall ball and band, the State Fair in the middle of the month, and Halloween at the end of it. Office days don't stop for any of that. So on the first Sunday of October, I cooked ahead for most of it.
What I made
These costs are for the freezer part only. Rice, tortillas or a bag salad on the night add a dollar or two.
- Chili, two gallon bags, one dinner each: $22.94, or $11.47 a dinner. This is the chili that waited all September for cold weather.
- King Ranch chicken casserole, foil pan, unbaked: $14.10
- White chicken enchiladas, foil pan, unbaked: $13.45
- Pork carnitas Crock-Pot bag: a raw 4 1/2-pound shoulder with the rub, onion, garlic and orange juice, ready to dump in on an office morning. $11.40
- Meatballs and sauce for spaghetti night: $13.85
- Chicken tortilla soup: $10.90
- Hamburger steaks, raw patties stacked between parchment, with a bag of onion gravy: $13.06
- Red beans with smoked sausage, rice made fresh on the night: $9.30
- Foil pans, gallon bags and vacuum sealer bags: $9.00
Total: $118.00, about $13.11 a dinner, a little under the $15 or so a weeknight dinner usually costs us. Kroger had ground beef family packs on sale at $5.49 a pound, so the 7 pounds came from there. The chicken was two Costco rotisserie chickens and a family pack of thighs. I shopped Saturday: Costco with Matt in the morning, Aldi and Kroger after lunch.
The cooking order
Four hours only works if the slowest things start first and no burner ever sits empty. Here's how the afternoon actually ran:
- 12:30. Red beans, soaked overnight, into the Instant Pot. While it came to pressure, I cubed the pork shoulder, rubbed it and sealed it raw in a gallon bag. First bag in the freezer by 12:50.
- 12:50. Setting up my station: seven onions, four bell peppers, two heads of garlic and a bunch of cilantro, chopped and divided into bowls by recipe. It's the boring part, and it's the part that makes everything after it fast.
- 1:15. Chili in the big stockpot. Brown three pounds of beef, add the onions, spices, beans and tomatoes, and let it simmer on the back burner for 90 minutes.
- 1:20. Wyatt shredded both rotisserie chickens at the kitchen table, paid in Hot Cheetos.
- 1:45. Meatballs. Wyatt and Eli rolled forty of them, in a creative range of sizes, and they cooked in both air fryer baskets in two batches while a double batch of sauce simmered in the Dutch oven.
- 2:30. Beans out of the Instant Pot, sliced sausage stirred in, pot washed and refilled for the chicken tortilla soup. Meanwhile I assembled the King Ranch casserole and the white chicken enchiladas in foil pans.
- 3:20. Hamburger steak patties, shaped and stacked. Onion gravy made in the cast iron.
- 3:45. Cooling, bagging, sealing and labeling, washing as I went.
Rosie napped through the middle of it, and when she woke up, Matt took her and Biscuit to the park so the kitchen could stay a kitchen.
Labels, cooling, and the part that ran over
Every bag and pan gets a strip of blue painter's tape with the name, the date and the reheating directions: "KING RANCH 10/4. Thaw overnight. 350 covered 45, uncovered 15." Bags freeze flat on sheet pans and then stand upright on the ready-to-heat side of the chest freezer, where I can flip through them like folders. The inventory list on the lid got nine new lines, right under the peaches and this year's Hatch chiles.
Here's where four hours turned into four hours and twenty minutes. Chili and soup need to be cold before they're bagged, and a full stockpot holds its heat for a long time. I should have split the chili into shallow pans at 3:00. Instead, at 4:30, it was still warm, so it went into the fridge in two shallow pans and got bagged after the kids were in bed. The USDA's guidance on cooling big batches is specific and worth reading before a cook day of your own. Mine comes down to shallow pans, early, and I was late.
The nine dinners already have assignments: office-day Tuesdays and Thursdays, the Thursday before we go to the fair, a Saturday after a fall ball doubleheader, and one held back for whichever week somebody gets sick. Halloween chili gets its own fresh pot, as always. That one I'll make on the night, with the costumes half on.
