Frozen Assets Versus 30 Day Gourmet
Known as once a month cooking, freezer cooking, bulk cooking or other names, this method of cooking is gaining in popularity. In our current society of busy families, couples and singles, finding time to prepare and serve a healthy meal every day is getting more and more difficult. Add in the easy convenience of drive thru fast food and restaurants that not only prepare take out food but bring it to you in your car, it is far easier to have someone else prepare the meal than carve out the time to do it yourself. Having a freezer filled with healthy foods that can go from freezer to table in a short amount of time is being a new alternative. The number of books that help cooks prepare meals is ever increasing. As the number of books increases, the question “which book is best?” is being asked more and more.
The two books that seem to take the lead in the race to the freezer are Frozen Assets: How to Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month by Deborah Taylor-Hough and The Freezer Cooking Manual from 30 Day Gourmet: A Month of Meals Made Easy by Nanci Salage and Tara Wohlenhaus. Both books have descriptions on how to select recipes, put together a shopping list, and prepare the meals and freezing directions for all recipes. In addition each book has other information to help you understand how this method of cooking works and can help you manage your time, and sometimes your budget, more effectively.
Frozen Assets: How to Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month by Deborah Taylor-Hough
Frozen Assets is a book that gives recipes and a method on preparing enough meals to feed your family for a month all in one day. These meals are then stored in the freezer and bought out to finish cooking or reheating the day you serve the meal. The book gives examples of menus and recipes for both two week and four week cooking sessions and will walk you through the process from making the shopping list, preparing the meals, freezing them and the finishing on the day you serve the meal. Ms. Taylor-Hough uses family friendly recipes that are economical and have been kitchen tested many times with more than one family.
In Frozen Assets, Ms. Taylor-Hough includes tips to make your preparation easier, some of which are very easy and some of which cause you to go “ah ha, why didn’t I think of that earlier?” Some of these tips are as simple as calculating the amount of chopped onion you need for all your recipes and doing it all at once and when you have a meal with more than one part, tape the containers together so they don’t get separated in the freezer. Ms. Taylor-Hough addresses ways to overcome the problem of only having a small freezer above the refrigerator and still being able to cook ahead. She suggests various types of containers for your meals and ways to organize your freezer to find things easier.
One of the biggest cons of Frozen Assets is that the recipes are repeated in the book and Ms. Taylor-Hough recommends using the same recipe multiple times during a month. In the section for a two-week cooking session she has many recipes that are repeated in the directions for the four-week cooking session. Many of the recipes also include items that I consider convenience food such as canned soups and prepared bread dough.
In addition to Frozen Assets, Ms. Taylor-Hough has written other books that contain more recipes. These include Frozen Assets Lite and Easy: How to Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month and Frozen Assets Readers’ Favorites: Cook for a Day: Eat for a Month. Ms. Taylor-Hough also has created an email loop at Yahoo Groups for discussion of recipes and techniques that involve freezer cooking.
The Freezer Cooking Manual from 30 Day Gourmet: A Month of Meals Made Easy by Nanci Salage and Tara Wohlenhaus
30 Day Gourmet also gives techniques, tips and recipes to prepare a month’s worth of meals in one day. The authors walk you through the selection of recipes, putting together the shopping list, doing the shopping and preparing the meals. In addition to helping you with those steps, they have put together a number of forms to help you get organized. One of these forms help you organize the shopping list based on the layout of your favorite grocery store. Another form will help you with taking your recipes and calculating the amount of ingredients for making multiple meals of that recipe. The recipes included with 30 Day Gourmet are family friendly and include directions one or multiple meals from the same recipe. Many of the recipes are economical to prepare and the authors have included ways to incorporate your slow cooker in the preparation of the meals.
One of the major advantages of the 30 Day Gourmet is that they help you adapt your favorite recipes to freezer cooking. Like Freezer Assets, 30 Day Gourmet uses many convenience foods like canned soups and seasoning packets in addition to other recipes. 30 Day Gourmet has some recipes that are extremely easy to assemble to freeze, such as marinades to pour over chicken breasts or beef strips and then freeze. This allows the meat to marinate while it is thawing to make that meal ready to put on the grill as soon as it thaws.
30 Day Gourmet also compares the various types of freezer containers and which work best for what type of meals. They also give tips on organizing your freezer. In addition they have a section on cooking with a friend or a group of friends. 30 Day Gourmet has a website and once you purchase the book, you can go there and obtain additional recipes. Plus they have discussion boards where readers can post some of their families’ favorite recipes.
One disadvantage of the 30 Day Gourmet is that the title makes you think that you are going to find gourmet or more sophisticated recipes than you find in other cookbooks. This is not the case. The recipes are for easy to prepare foods that are common among families, not ones that I would classify as gourmet. For my purposes that are fine, with picky eaters in my family I don’t want ingredients such as goat’s cheese or capers.
Nanci Salage and Tara Wohlenhaus have also written other books for freezer cooking, these include Vegetarian Freezer Cooking and Co-op Cuisine: Freezer Cooking with Friends.
In Summary:
Both cookbooks are very helpful to someone who is just starting out with freezer cooking and both have different recipes that your family may or may not like. I prefer The Freezer Cooking Manual from 30 Day Gourmet: A Month of Meals Made Easy by Nanci Salage and Tara Wohlenhaus because of the organizational forms and information on adapting my recipes for freezer cooking.
For someone who is just starting out with freezer cooking and doesn’t have a lot of cooking experience, either book would be a good start and you might find the recipes in are Frozen Assets: How to Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month by Deborah Taylor-Hough a little easier to follow.
Or you can purchase both books and use the parts of each that you find most helpful.
The price of the cookbooks is about the same and often you can find them on sale online for under $10. Most public libraries will have one or the other of the books and many have both cookbooks.
