Chelle's OAMC Page

I credit OAMC, or Once A Month Cooking, with a lot of my ability to stay on a food budget. I come home from work exhausted, but I can manage to pop something into a microwave, or bake something in the oven, if it doesn't involve a lot of prep work.

Actually, I'm lumping a lot of things together under the OAMC umbrella: investment cooking, wise shopping, and tightwadding tips for slashing your food budget. That's because I don't do them separately; they're all part of the way I prepare food for my family. So you'll find them all here, but I'll try to separate them so that you can pick and choose to find something that fits your family and your budget. Don't be afraid to make changes to anything that I (or anyone else) suggest--if it doesn't work for you, it doesn't matter how many people it did work for!

OAMC

I'm not an OAMC expert. There are people out there who have been doing this for years; I started during the summer of 99. And most of what I learned came from the folks at the Friendly-Freezer mailing list, which truly lives up to its name. (Warning: It generates a LOT of mail. There are over 1700 people on it, and even though only a fraction of us talk, there's a lot of traffic.)

The idea behind OAMC is, "cook for a day, eat for a month." OAMC in its "pure" form involves preparing meals for your family for a month, then freezing them. Many people do it that way, but a lot of cooks would rather just prepare double and triple recipes of foods they prepare for their families. I do "bulk" cooking: I prepare several recipes with the same (usually on loss-leader sale) main ingredient, then freeze them, integrating them into my menu planning along with my previously-prepared meals using other ingredients. All of it operates under the same general principle, though: preparing food in advance so that you always have homemade meals ready to pop in the oven or microwave.

• OAMC: Why bother?

• I don't have any special cooking equipment. Can I still do OAMC?

• Sure, that works fine for you, but I have to feed kids!

• How does OAMC save money?

• Sounds great. How do I start?

OAMC: Why bother?

I have to admit that about 2 p.m. on cooking day, I ask myself this same question, but in general, I know why I do bulk cooking. It saves us a lot of money, it saves me time, and it gives us much healthier food than we would have otherwise.

When I get home at 5:00, exhausted (I leave for work at 6:30 a.m.), the last thing I want to do is cook dinner. It used to be the last thing I did, too; we ate out at least four days a week last year--and a lot of the time, "eating in" meant Hamburger Helper or Kraft Macaroni and Toxic Glowing Orange Powder. (I like Macaroni and TGOP, personally, but I don't kid myself that it's good for me.) That was before I discovered bulk cooking. Now we can eat a homecooked meal six days a week (on Fridays, we volunteer at a youth mentoring program that provides us pizza; we eat "out" for a $5 donation), with no more effort when I get home from work. And rather than spending $15-$50 on a restaurant meal, we're spending just a little money for homecooked food.

But our friends are slow to warm to the idea, even though I think it would be perfect for many of them. I don't argue with them too much because I don't want to be branded a wild-eyed, freezer-bag-wielding fanatic, but here, I'm going to respond to some of the negative comments I've heard.

• "I don't have enough money to buy all that food at once. We get paid weekly."
  Okay, don't cook for a month. When you find a good sale on a main-dish ingredient (usually meat), buy as much as your budget will allow, and make several things to freeze. Or just plan to double or triple some of the things you make for dinner.
• "Sure, it's easier than cooking every night, but popping in a TV dinner is even easier!"
  Maybe a little bit--you don't have to prepare the TV dinner ahead of time--but have you read the ingredients? The nutrition label? And we never found those dinners very filling, either, so they provide a rotten value for money, IMO. And not all recipes for freezer cooking are insanely complicated, either! I make very simple meals most of the time--meatloaf, soup, barbecue, etc. We prefer eating them, and I certainly prefer cooking them!
• "Okay, that's a great time-saver for working mothers, but I'm home all day. Why should I bother?"
  You mean you wouldn't prefer to get up every morning (Okay, 29 mornings a month) knowing that one of your daily chores was already taken care of?

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I don't have any special cooking equipment. Can I still do OAMC?

I'm doing bulk cooking (which is basically like OAMC, except that it's not planned meals for a month--it's meals based on a large purchase of sale-priced meat) in a tiny apartment kitchen, with basic pots, pans, and a crock-pot. I don't own a food processor. My knives came from the grocery store. I do own a bread machine and a microwave, but could get by without them.

Any more questions? :)

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Sure, that works fine for you, but I have to feed kids!

Yeah? I have to feed my partner, who's about as picky as any ten five-year-olds! (You know I love you, honey.) There's no reason why the food you put in your freezer has to be stuff your family doesn't like. I freeze things like sloppy joes, meatloaf, spaghetti sauce, barbecue, and chili. I save "exotic" dishes for days when I want to cook from scratch--even if we like the dish. After all, who wants to eat Kung Pao chicken three times in a month? (Okay, I could...but it's expensive.)

Cook foods your family likes. And know that you're feeding your kids food that's much better for them than Happy Meals...even if they gripe that dinner no longer comes with a toy surprise.

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How does OAMC save money?

So you're convinced that investment cooking will save you time, and will provide better-quality meals than you can get Chez Ronald. But does it really save money?

All I can say is, it does for us! Even without making a conscious effort to save money, we went from spending over $700/month for food to spending under $300 (for food, cleaning, pet supplies, and paper products). That was before I started trying to save money on food purchases.

How?

• Home-cooked meals are cheaper than restaurant meals. A quarter-pound cheeseburger "value meal" at a local fast food restaurant costs $3.29 plus tax. I can serve the same meal (burger, fries, soda) for less than $1 per person, and I can serve a much more filling, nutritionally superior meal for the same price or less. And that's comparing the bottom-of-the-line restaurants to home cooking. A meatloaf dinner (meatloaf, 2 vegetables, drink) at a family-style restaurant costs us $7.58 per person, plus tax and tip...let's say $9. The same meal, even throwing in a generous estimate (75 cents) for energy costs, etc., is about $2 at home. Gee...$18 versus $4...plus the food's better.
• If I cook in bulk, I save money over nightly cooking because I'm able to take advantage of family-packs of meat (how else is a family of 2 going to use 5 lbs. of hamburger? Even a family of 8 couldn't use that much in a meal!). The above estimates were using $0.99/lb. ground beef and $0.23/lb. potatoes. If I bought smaller packages, I'd pay $1.29 for the beef (shopping sales, still) and $0.49 for the potatoes. Still cheaper than restaurants, but not as cheap.
• Investment cooking reduces waste in my kitchen. We have fewer "leftovers" to spoil in the fridge, because I package food in 2-serving amounts. If we have a little bit left over, one of us can eat it for lunch, and because it doesn't happen a lot, we actually will eat it for lunch.

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Sounds great. How do I start?

Follow one of the links below (titles in yellow are to pages not yet constructed--sorry!) to get more information!

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Smart Shopping 101

This is just a collection of tips and advice. I'll keep adding to it as I think of more things to include, but if you're serious about smart shopping, I suggest you check out a copy of The Complete Tightwad Gazette, by Amy Dacyczyn. (There are other books about frugal living out there, but I think this one is the best.)

Here are some ways I've found to save money at the supermarket.

• Buy loss leaders. Loss leaders are those products advertised in big type, usually on the front page, of your supermarket circular. Stores actually mark these down to prices at which they lose money, gambling that you'll buy lots of other high-profit items when you come in to buy 99-cent ground beef. Beat the system--buy sale items.
• Keep a price book. A price book is, essentially, a record of what you can expect to pay per unit (ounce, gallon,pound, whatever seems a reasonable unit) for items you buy. It helps you find the best prices and determine whether a sale, a coupon, or a bulk purchase is really a good deal. Sometimes it's not. You also can see which store is the best for a particular item.You can keep your price book in a notebook or on your computer. I keep mine in Excel; I also have a mini-notebook that I take shopping with me. In that notebook, I keep a record of my best price ever and my "no higher than" price--the price above which I just won't buy the item. I also make a note of what store I should generally look in for good deals. It's hard sometimes to explain a price book--the following is a few lines from mine.
  

• Buy in bulk. Even when they're not on sale, family packs of meat are generally cheaper than smaller packages. Gallons of milk are cheaper than quarts. With a freezer and some storage containers, even small families can buy in bulk, especially if you are creative about storage space. (Our linen closet is a pantry now. We store our towels under the sink, and we store our sheets in a cedar chest. I have shelving in the dining room, and I'm planning to put more in soon.) But here's a warning....
• Check per-unit prices. Bigger is not always cheaper. I just had that proven to me at the supermarket. I had intended to buy a 5-lb. bucket of peanut butter; we eat a lot of it, and I figured it would be cheaper. My best price for peanut butter is 5.6 cents an ounce, but I'll pay up to 10 cents an ounce. I looked at the per-unit price on the shelf tag for the 5 lb., and it was 13 cents an ounce! The 3-lb. bucket was cheaper, but still 11 cents an ounce. The 18-ounce jars, however, were 8.3 cents an ounce, so I bought four. (Note. Supermarkets are required to put unit prices on their shelf tags. However, their unit prices may not be the best way for you to compare prices, so bring a calculator. For example, I like to calculate the per-gallon cost of milk, including instant powdered milk, but the price of powdered milk is given per ounce of powder in my store. So I figure up how many gallons it's supposed to make, and divide that into the cost.)
• Shop at several stores. I manage this mostly by doing my shopping once a month. I have seen a lot of savings from doing that, as the prices on items vary widely. Some things are about the same price everywhere, but others are significantly cheaper at one store. For most of the "doesn't really matter" products, I shop at the store where they have the widest variety, and best quality, of store brands. I also shop at Big Lots about once a month, where I stock up on canned goods and pastas. I buy dish soap and paper products at the dollar store or at Wal-Mart. The price book lets me see where I'm getting the best deal.
• Operate on the pantry principle. I'm only about halfway done with this process. When I find something at a good price (based on my price book), I buy a lot of it--enough, I hope, to last until it goes on sale again. I'm still fine-tuning this process, and I'm still having to buy some things when they're not on sale, but I'm gradually working on being able to purchase items only when they're on sale.

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Reader's Tips

I'd like to include some of your tips for saving money. Just e-mail me and I'll put them up when I get a chance!

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Slashing Your Food Budget

Okay, all the information above will help cut your food budget, but here are some other things that you can combine with smart shopping to get maximum value from your food money.

• Cut down the amount of meat you eat.
  Besides being expensive, eating too much meat is unhealthy, and meat is a very inefficient use of natural resources. So there are a lot of reasons to cut down on the amount of meat you feed your family. Some painless ways of doing that are (1) serving at least one meatless (egg, cheese, or bean-based) meal a week, (2) serving smaller portions of meat and letting people fill up on side dishes, (3) reducing the amount of meat you use in recipes such as casseroles, soups, and stews. You'll want to increase the veggies and/or starchy foods in the recipe to make up for the lost volume.
• Only buy fresh produce in season.
  Eating seasonally will help you cut your food budget and will ensure you're eating foods at their peak quality. Canned and frozen fruits and veggies can supplement your seasonal fresh produce. (You can freeze your own if you garden, or buy frozen.) But big tossed salads shouldn't be a regular part of your wintertime table if you really want to save the most money, unless you happen to find a good deal. (I found some great deals on lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumber recently (in November), and we had salad for a while. Also, the growing season is pretty long here, so we get "summer" foods longer. Otherwise, though, I'm trying to avoid summer veggies until summer.)
• Avoid processed foods.
  Another money-saving tip that also provides a health bonus. I can make a "hamburger helper" type dish (hamburger, pasta, and sauce) in about the same time it would take me to make the boxed stuff, and I'm using fresher ingredients and fewer chemicals. Plus, it's cheaper. The boxed stuff is $2.69 here, but to make cheeseburger macaroni, I only spend about $1.25, plus the cost of the meat--and I'm not using processed foods. Rice is cheaper than Rice-A-Roni. Flour, sugar, etc., are cheaper than cake mixes--and really not that much more difficult.
• Plan your menus.
  I don't have a written "It's the 17th, so it's meatloaf" plan. But I do make a plan, based on what's cheap at the market, and I do make a very careful list. The only "impulse" buys I generally make are things that are on unadvertised great sales, like the time I found 5 lbs. of sugar for 59 cents.
• Try to use everything.
  When I make large quantities of potato dishes to freeze (and yes, you can freeze potatoes, but you have to cook them at least partway first), I turn the peels into "potato skins" and serve them for lunch. When I cook a turkey (which I do in the winter, when they're cheap), we eat the breast for dinners and in sandwiches, use the dark meat in casseroles and soups, and make broth from the carcass. I also keep containers of "little bits" of leftovers in the freezer to use in casseroles and soups. I save the liquid from canned veggies to use as broth when I cook. If you make maximum use of the foods you buy, you'll find your food budget stretching farther.

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Reader's Tips

E-mail me with your tips for saving money on food, and I'll put them up here!

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I plan to have a guestbook soon. Until then, if you have any questions or comments, e-mail me!

You are visitor number to visit this page since November 28, 1999. If I were you, I'd seek professional help.

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