OAMC - Follow Up

Thanks for the comments and questions on OAMC!

I'll do my best to answer them here.

1) OAMC is doable without a dedicated deep-freeze. Just look at this woman's freezer:

First, you will need to clean out your freezer and purge all old and unnecessary items. You may have to sacrifice your ice cube tray area, depending on the freezer. But, as you can see from the photo, most OAMC meals can be frozen in nice flat gallon-size plastic bags. These stack really well, so you can fit a lot in a small space.

It's important to keep an inventory of what's in the freezer. I recently started doing this, and it has been immensely helpful. As I use each item, I cross it off the list. I update the list on my computer and print out a new one each Sunday.

2) How many meals feed our family for a month? Well, we really aren't too legalistic about this. For an average session, I probably make about 6 recipes and double each one. Depending on the month's schedule (dinner at friends', vacation, church meals) I'll use 3-4 frozen meals a week. Doug always takes leftovers to work, so if he didn't do that, the meals would probably stretch further.

3) Nobody asked this, but it's something VERY important that I forgot to add. One of the FUNDAMENTAL KEYS TO SUCCESS (too much politics) is to have a plan of what you're going to eat on which day. When you forget to pull something out of the freezer to thaw, and dinner-time comes along, you're up a crick without a paddle. That's when we usually ding ourselves by getting Chinese or pizza. With a calendar of meals, I always have one or two things in the fridge, thawing out.

Another way around this is to always make at least one recipe that doesn't require thawing. For example, our chimichangas are put into the oven still frozen. They are good to use when I've forgotten to thaw something, or we've finished a meal sooner than I thought we would.

Hope this helps!