Large Family Management

Reality Based Structure and Systems (for the win!)

Batch Cooking to Save Time

How I front load some of my cooking to cut down on the total time it takes to prepare a meal.|Large family|Batch cooking|Bulk Cooking

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Batch cooking or batch prepping in my home has become a necessity. It cuts down on how long it takes for me to get a lunch or a dinner on the table by front-loading my work.

I spend time at the beginning of the month (right after I do my major grocery shopping) cooking and portioning out food. And I also spend some time weekly (generally on weekends) preparing other foods that will help throughout the week.

Getting this batch cooking and prepping done early on makes all of my kitchen work run so much more smoothly, and really helps when something unexpected pops into my schedule. More often than not I can shift gears in the kitchen, rather than turn to more expensive and less healthy convenience foods.

Let me tell you how my system works!

Batch Cooking-Ground Beef

I buy two big packages of ground beef at Costco every month, it comes to around thirteen pounds total.

Within a few days of going to Costco (I try to time this for a weekend day) I will get out my big electric skillet and cook the beef, one package at a time (one whole package fits in my skillet!). I season it with salt and pepper, and let it drain on a pan lined with paper towels.

Once all of the beef has cooled, I portion it out into Ziploc bags and place it in the freezer. I generally end up with about 12 bags of cooked meat.

I will use this meat throughout the month for pasta sauce, taco meat, homemade hamburger helper, and rice dishes.

Cooking the ground beef ahead of time shaves about fifteen minutes off of the total time it takes to cook the meal. The best part is, I don’t have to remember to de-thaw the meat!

I can just toss it into the skillet and it will thaw as it cooks with the sauce of whatever it’s going into.

I am always hit or miss with thawing things in time. Half the time, I will remember and set it out in time, but cooked ground beef thaws out really quickly in a sauce, so it’s no biggie!

Batch Cooking-Chicken

The way I batch cook my chicken isn’t really cooking at all, it’s processing. When I go to Costco, I will buy 3-4 rotisserie chickens (depending on whether I still have any in the freezer) and I will sit down and pull all of the meat off of the bones.

I divide it up into meal sized portions, put it in Ziplocs and put it in the freezer. I can expect to get about 2.5 bags full out of each chicken, so I end up putting 7-10 bags of chicken into the freezer.

The chicken will be used in tacos, enchiladas, casseroles, rice dishes, and sometimes, we’ll just have a big salad night, so I’ll set it out for toppings for that.

It’s cheap, easy, and works perfectly in a pinch!

Batch Cooking-Beans

I cook up two pressure cooker pots full of dried beans each week, one of pinto, one of black beans. Each pot holds six cups of dried beans, so that is a ton of cooked beans at the end of the process!

I store the beans in their cooking liquid in plastic containers, that I buy at the restaurant supply store.

We use these beans throughout the week for lunches, and also in recipes for dinner. I hate buying canned beans because they are too expensive, and opening enough of those little cans to feed my family is exhausting!

I buy the dried beans in 50 lb bags for about $22, so I am saving a lot of money over canned beans.

Batch Cooking-Rice

My kids and husband love cilantro lime rice, so I make up one or two batches a week to go with beans for lunch, or to have with tacos. I store it in the large plastic containers , and the kids just dish it out as needed for their lunches.

Batch Prepping-Fruits and Vegetables

I will batch-prep fruits and vegetables to have on hand and ready to serve along with meals, and for snacks. Fruits and veggies are the only snack foods that I keep in the house, so keeping them prepped and ready is important.

I do this once a week and get my children in on the action. I like to keep peeled sliced cucumbers, carrot sticks, celery, peeled and sectioned oranges ready in the refrigerator.

I try to arrange my week so that I have time for all of the batch cooking and prepping on the weekend. It takes up a few hours of time, but the time savings throughout the week makes it so worth it!

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Cook Once, Eat Three Different Meals–BBQ Chicken Edition

How I batch cook once for bbq chicken, and serve three different meals.|Large Family|Batch Cooking|Bulk Cooking

Yesterday I posted about how I will cook one huge meal, and then use the leftovers for two additional meals, but slightly modified so that they are entirely new meals.

I shared how I do this with chili, and now I’m going to show you how I do it with BBQ chicken!

This is really such a simple concept, but it is so helpful for a busy, stressed Mom, and really doesn’t require significant additional time, unlike making freezer meals (which is also another great way to make mealtimes less stressful, but for me, I have to have a block of time to set aside to actually do it!).

BBQ Chicken, Three Ways

Day One: You are going to need to figure out exactly how much chicken to prepare for three days worth of meals. Take your normal amount, and multiply it by three.

I generally just use boneless skinless chicken breasts, or bone-in chicken breasts, and pull the meat off the bone. If you are really strapped for time, you could pick up three rotisserie chickens at Costco, pull the meat off and call it a day. Costco has the best price and the biggest birds, so get them there!

I generally just prepare my chicken in the crockpot, now that I have an Instant Pot, I could do it there too. Preparation is super simple, though. Throw the chicken in, season it with salt and pepper, and any other seasonings that you might like with BBQ, and let it cook until the meat is easily shredded with two forks.

You are going to want to start this before lunchtime because remember, your crockpot is going to be packed to the gills with three times more meat than you normally cook.

After the meat has cooked, shred it up with two forks and either put it back in the empty crock (toss or save the broth for later). You are now going to douse it liberally with your favorite BBQ sauce. We use Sweet Baby Ray’s, but the brand isn’t important.

You could even make your own if you have a recipe you like and have time. Make sure that your chicken is good and saucy though, you don’t want it to be dry.

Meal One: BBQ Chicken Sandwiches
You are going to serve meal one with buns or rolls (homemade or store bought), a salad, and some fruit if you have it. If your children are hearty eaters, you may want to serve an additional starch, so that they don’t eat too much of the chicken. (Another way to avoid the children eating too much of the meat is to only put out one-third of the total chicken. Cover and put the rest out of site).

Meal Two: BBQ Chicken Potato Skins
We love potato skins in my family, and they are a really cheap way to stretch a meal! Bake your potatoes: for younger children, I bake one per child (remember the middle will be scooped out) and for older children, 8 and up, I will bake two). If you have a lot of extra potatoes, feel free to bake up more, this is so easy to stretch by just putting less meat on each potato.

After your potatoes have baked, you will need to let them cook enough to handle. Cut them in half lengthwise, then scoop out the middle. I try to leave about 1/4 inch of potato still in the skin, but reserve the rest for fried potatoes at a later time (with breakfast or lunch) 1/4 inch seems to be just the right amount.

Season your scooped out skins with salt and pepper, I also use some garlic and onion powder. After seasoning, add your bbq chicken to each skin. and spread it out. Depending on the size of your potatoes, I will add one to two tablespoons of meat to each half.

Once the meat is evenly distributed, sprinkle with some shredded cheddar cheese, and put them in the oven. I usually leave them in a 350-degree oven for about twenty minutes, but they just need to be hot.

Serve with sour cream, a salad, and fruit if you have it. (There are never any extras left over, no matter how many I end up making. My older boys always devour what’s left!)

Meal Three: BBQ Chicken Pizza
This is a really simple meal. You can use your favorite pizza crust for this recipe, you can buy the Pillsbury pre-made pizza dough (the one in a can), or you could even buy a pre-baked crust.

Get your dough shaped into a pizza shape, either round, or pressed into a rectangular jelly roll pan. Spread the dough with bbq sauce, the same way you would spread out your pizza sauce, and in the same quantity.

Spread the last of your BBQ chicken over the pizzas, and then top with red onions (if your family likes them, you can use raw red onion, or sauté them first), and I like to use a mix of cheddar and mozzarella cheese to finish it off.

Bake in a 450-degree over for 10-15 minutes, until the crust is gold and the toppings are hot and bubbly. If you are using a pre-baked crust, follow the package directions.

Serve with a salad and fruit if you have it.

These three-day menus are such lifesavers for me, and they do a fantastic job of keeping the family from getting bored. Each meal is so different from the last that nobody notices or cares that the food is partial left-overs.

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Cook Once, Eat Three Different Meals–Chili Edition

How I cook up one huge batch of chili, and serve three totally different meals!|Large family|Batch Cooking|Bulk Cooking

A few years ago I was reading on the Balancing Beauty and Bedlam blog and I stumbled across an old article about how the author, Jennifer, would cook up a huge quantity of a meal (about three times larger than what they could eat at one setting), and then, she would take the leftovers and divide them in half, and serve them two different ways over the course of the next two days.

So she put in the work up front to cook once on day 1, then on days 2 and 3, she spent a little bit of time turning the first meal into something totally different.

I’ve always loved this idea because let’s face it…coming up with and cooking a brand new meal for each day is sometimes daunting. And on the busiest of weeks, it becomes considerably more difficult.

I started putting Jennifer’s excellent “Cook Once” idea into practice, and I have a few different main staple meals that I do it with. I’d love to share one of those meals with you.

Chili–Cook Once, Eat Three Different Meals

I make up an enormous (seriously, it’s HUGE!) pot of chili on day 1. I keep the costs lower by only using two pounds of ground beef, and using six cups of dry beans. I also buy the institutional sized cans of diced tomatoes, crushed tomatoes, and tomato sauce instead of the much smaller cans.

I throw it together in the morning, let it simmer all day, make a simple cornbread recipe in the evening, and serve it with sour cream and shredded cheese.

It’s always a huge hit, and there is always a ton left over.

On Day 2, I will take half of the leftover chili and make it into Chili Mac. First I add at least four cups of water to the chili to thin it out, and I heat it up until it is simmering. I cook the macaroni right in with the chili, so you have to add enough liquid for the pasta to cook well.

So I add the right amount of macaroni, which is usually just one box worth for our family, we like to have a higher chili to noodle ratio, but if you don’t have quite as much leftover, or you need to stretch it for a crowd, just add more macaroni and more water.

Simmer the chili mac until the noodles are the right consistency (I go just a little longer than the box directions, al dente Chili Mac isn’t that great). I stay close to the stove while the pasta is cooking and stir every few minutes to keep the beans or the pasta from sticking.

After the pasta is done, taste and adjust your seasonings. I serve this up with sour cream and shredded cheddar cheese again.

On Day 3, I make up a Chili Tater Tot Casserole. The first thing that you need to do is get the tater tots in the oven and get them nice and crispy and golden brown on a baking sheet (usually about 30 minutes in a 400 degree oven).

While the tater-tots are cooking, warm up your chili and thin it out some. You don’t want it to be soup consistency, but you do want it to be thinner than chili. The tater tots will absorb some of the liquid, so you don’t want to be left with dry, crusty chili.

Once the tater tots are crisp and the chili is hot, spray a casserole dish with non-stick spray, scoop your tots into the dish, and level them out. Then, pour the chili on top, and top it with a layer of shredded cheese.

Place your casserole dish back in the 400 degree oven and let it cook for 10-15 minutes. Serve with sour cream.

None of these three meals are an exact science, notice I didn’t provide a recipe for any of them. This is because you’ll need to adjust these for your own family’s tastes and preferences.

Every family has its own chili recipe, so use yours and get started! Cooking this way is especially helpful during a busy week when you would otherwise be tempted to order take-out or use more expensive convenience food.

I always serve each meal with a salad. All of the tomatoes in the chili are fantastic, but I like to add in something fresh too.

This principle of Cook Once, Eat Three Different Meals is just one more weapon in your arsenal to keep your grocery budget down, and the health of your children up.

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I failed at Serving My Children Enough Fruits and Vegetables! Five Ways I Turned It All Around

My children barely ate any fruits and veggies until this changed. Now, they eat more than the recommended amount every single day!

Fourteen years ago, when I was at the very beginning of my mothering journey, I was under the impression that organic produce was the only produce worth eating, and conventionally grown fruits and vegetables were poison for me, but especially poisonous for my growing baby.

At this time, we barely had two dimes to rub together, so as you can imagine, there was not much extra money at all to purchase organic produce.

I stuck to the fruits and vegetables that I could afford outside of the dirty dozen (mostly bananas, green beans, broccoli, and carrots), and if we are being totally honest, I wasn’t faithful in getting more than a banana at breakfast, and a vegetable at dinner time into my children, or into myself.

I felt like I was feeding my family a much healthier diet than the SAD (Standard American Diet) because I baked bread from freshly ground grain, we only drank Organic Milk, I made our yogurt, homemade chicken stock, we ate coconut oil, and we bought grass-fed beef from a neighboring farmer in bulk. Oh! I also bought only organic strawberry jelly and the fancy peanut butter that tastes like chalk.

I would love to say that I skipped blissfully through those lean years and everything was fantastic as a result of my efforts, but I would be lying. The truth is, we were ALWAYS sick! ALWAYS! It was ridiculous!

I couldn’t figure out why with ALL the effort I put into feeding my family “healthfully”, we weren’t thriving.

This went on and on, year after year, and I finally just accepted that this was life. My family did not have a robust immune system, and that was just the end of it.

Light at the End of the Tunnel?

About seven years ago, I got serious about shedding some baby weight, and as a result, I started making sure to get in at least eight servings of fruits and vegetables every single day. I ate conventionally raised produce because I still couldn’t afford organic. And I didn’t die! By eating so much produce and calorie counting, I was able to shed a good amount of weight.

I also started feeding my family a lot more produce because the children were really interested in eating everything I was eating. So we were finally eating a lot more produce as a family.

I noticed that we all were a little healthier. Instead of getting every single virus that crossed our path, we were able to dodge a few bullets!

To make an already long story slightly shorter, we fell off the fruit and veggie wagon when I got pregnant with our seventh baby. I was also working way too much and otherwise not taking care of myself, and not only was I not making nearly as much food from scratch, but we were relying heavily on convenience food, and fruits and veggies were a very low priority.

We started getting sick again.

It finally occurred to me about four years ago that the reason why we were always sick might have something to do with the fact that we were consuming WAY below the recommended amount of fruits and veggies.

For a woman who took so much pride (too much) in what I fed my family, I was completely missing the boat one of the most important areas of nutrition. The USDA recommendations are between 4 and 6 total cups of fruits and vegetables for older children and adults, and less for younger children, depending on age. For exact recommendations, check here.

We are so much healthier (in terms of how often we get sick) now than we have ever been. This amazing change is going on three years now, so I don’t believe that it’s coincidence! Just in the last two months, several of the families that we attend church with have had stomach viruses, two rounds of strep throat, and colds. In this same time period, my two youngest children have caught one minor cold, and that’s it!

In the interest of full-disclosure, I have had two sinus infections in the same time, but my doctor told me they are from the temperature flipping back and forth between mild and cold constantly. He said if it would just stay cold, I would stop getting them.

When I first realized that we weren’t eating enough fruits and veggies, it was overwhelming trying to figure out how to get the amount of produce that we should be consuming into our diets.

Five steps that I Followed to Add More Fruits and Vegetables

1. Change My Mindset on Organic Vegetables

Before I could fully embrace the change to more fruits and vegetables, I had to change my mindset about conventionally-grown produce. It would be unbelievably cost-prohibitive for me to purchase enough organic produce for a family with eleven family members. That’s insane!

While organic *may* be ideal (from an evidence perspective, the jury is out), it absolutely isn’t ideal to eat barely any produce. The ideal is to eat the recommended servings. If I am trying to feed my family as close to ideal as possible, then I have to let go of the “organic or bust” mindset.

And so I did.

2. All Snacks are Fruits and Vegetables

Prior to breakfast, and in the afternoon, the children know that they may have a snack, but it has to be fruit or veggies. No exceptions. If someone is absolutely dying of starvation, they may have a glass of milk AFTER they have had a fruit or vegetable.

3. Keep Cheap Vegetables Stocked

I keep a lot of the cheapest fruits and vegetables stocked and I *try* to keep them prepped for easy grab-and-go snacks. Right now I have a box of apples and pears in the sunroom. There is a huge bowl of (15) cucumbers that one of my daughters peeled and sliced in one of the refrigerators.

I also keep a big Costco-sized bag of baby carrots in the fridge, as well as washed and cut celery. And there is a bowl of bananas on the counter.

Having the fruit and vegetables handy and ready to eat makes all the difference.

4. Serve At Least One Fruit or Vegetable With Every Meal

With breakfast, I serve a fruit, either some frozen berries, cut up apples, or I’ll do applesauce in the Instant Pot to go with oatmeal, etc.

With lunch, I serve the snack veggies (cucumbers, celery, baby carrots).

And with dinner, we always have salad on the side, and usually at least one more raw vegetable and a cooked one.

5. Eat a Lot of Fruits and Vegetables Myself

If you read the entire post above, you may remember that I mentioned that when I started eating a lot of fruits and vegetables while dieting, my children wanted to start eating them too.

If you’ve been a mother for more than a year, you are most likely aware of the phenomenon where no matter what you are eating, your child wants some too. It can be a food that he previously rejected, but if it’s going into Mom’s mouth, he must have it!

Use this to your advantage, Mom! Let your children see you eating, savoring, and blissing out on fruits and vegetables, and soon enough, the little beggars will be playing right into your hand.

I can’t say it enough. If you aren’t getting enough fruits and vegetables in your diet, it’s time to up your game. Make the increase gradually, but do your very best to get into the guideline range. Give it a few months, I bet you’ll be pleased with how you are feeling!

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