Due to a busy day yesterday, I was unable to bestow my 2 cents onto the World Wide Web – my sincerest apologies to those of you who contacted me to make me aware of my abandonment. I had no idea how much you were all looking forward to reading about “C-Day” and seeing the pictures that go along with it!

The Problem

As the attempt to hone my cooking skills develops, it is important to make the motive behind C-Day very clear: While I don’t mind the occasional cooking for guests and entertaining purposes, it is the daily meal planning I have a problem with. I don’t care for the daily planning ahead, taking inventory of what I have, and determining what is for dinner only when my children are ravished. It always feels rushed and I always do a mediocre job. I know I can do better.

So, ten years in this, I’m at one of my favorite shopping boutiques, Ollie’s (Good Stuff Cheap), and I happen upon a bound treasure: a book on how to cook in one day, for the entire month. Eureka! Strolling through the aisles of a discount warehouse, I find the answers to my infinite nagging displeasure: for only 3.99.

First, when I got home, I read the book cover to cover. It talks about the life I was leading – the burden to cook and clean and plan – every day to feed my family. This book was written for me.

The Concept

Use your freezer chest (Which we recently acquired) to store fully cooked meals instead of the ingredients. Simple right? Oh yeah, baby. For the next two days I devoured this book and wrote down recipes and made a list like I’ve never made before. My ‘starving’ children and husband looked on with awe as I announced with fervor: “I am going grocery shopping!” (I think the Rocky theme song was playing in the background somewhere, but I could’ve just been me.)

Two days later, starting at about 8.00, my cooking day (C-Day) commenced. I rotated three recipes at one time: prepping one, cooking one, and cooling/packaging the other. Once one was packaged, in the freezer it went and I started a new one. Eleven meals later, I was beat and my kitchen was a mess – but my freezer was full and I was looking at a full month of very little planning/cooking/rushing.

For those of you who have silently despised the meal planning process but did it for your family and to show the world that you are the domestic slave you should be – There is a way!

Photos shown in order of top to bottom:

Lemon Chicken and Carrot Manicotti, Cheese Burger Pies, and Lime Cilantro Crab Cakes.