Can You Do Real Food Once a Month Cooking?

How great would it be to have such a service that calls on only fresh, whole food ingredients? I mean, can you do real food once a month cooking? Well let me tell you about this service and why you might not have considered it before! Freezer cooking used to mean 25 variations of the same formula: can of creamed soup+can of veggies+meat or beans+velveeta+crunchy onions=freezer meal. Am I right? Not too many years ago, make ahead meal stores popped up across the USA. They sure didn't last long but they did slightly improve on the cream of soup idea! Today, you can still find dozens upon dozens of blogs and services that provide you with an entire month of convenient, crowd-pleasing dinners that you can make in one day and eat for a month.

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How I Do Real Food Once a Month Cooking

I've talked about my two favorite meal planing services many times--Real Plans and TheFresh20. It wasn't until recently that I even considered purchasing a subscription to Once a Month Meals. Why? Because the featured recipes always included far too many processed carbs, too much cheese and too many cans! This year, I took a closer look at Once a Month Meals and found that the basic service wouldn't be plausible for a whole/real food eating family. However, the Pro Plan allows complete customization so only whole food recipes populated in my search.

At first glance, you can see that Once a Month Meals caters (occasionally) to just about every diet from vegetarian to Whole30 participants. However, when you explore that more closely, you'll find that the meal plan might fit the main category--like Paleo--but it does *not* also fit the "whole food" category. To remedy this: upgrade to the Pro Plan!

Working the Once a Month Meals Pro Plan

Once you have the Pro Plan, you can browse the menus and choose the one that looks most appealing...or even choose three! Our family does one complete menu of real food once a month cooking and a mini real food menu along with our nightly meal plan from RealPlans. I know that sounds like a lot of food but I will elaborate on that later. For now, you just need to pick one month of Meals to try! :) From here I will show you what I do in actionable steps:

1. Choose your Menu Plan.  I chose the Paleo one and a mini menu for the month.
2. Review *every* recipe and its ingredients.
3. Decide if substitutions will alter the recipe too much. Example: canned beans for homemade beans. That's a simple swap. Pizza on white flour crust, look for a freezeable grain free option or freeze one from our sourdough einkorn pizza crust recipe. 
4. If there are recipes your family won't eat or that have too many substitutions that won't allow the recipe to be a success...swap that meal.
5. That's it! Your meal plan is saved under "My Menus" and you can come back to it any time.

Once a Month Meals sends you a weekly email for 14 weeks to get you acclimated to their program. Follow those! They are fantastic. I made the mistake of printing the materials, shopping, prepping and even beginning to cook my menu *the very first day*! Two days later I got an email that said--"don't shop and prep in the same day". Trial by fire? It wasn't so awful of an experience that I gave up. I whipped up my next menu just 3 weeks later! That's when I learned to add the mini menu to have more prepared meals in my freezer.

Why Once a Month Meals and Real Plans?

I have found that nearly every service assumes you will dine out once or twice a week, eat cold sandwiches for lunch or have some other reason not to eat at home. That just isn't the case for my family and maybe not for yours! So this is what the meal plans look like for us within a month:

Once a Month Meals in Freezer:

16 days of breakfasts** (8 recipes served twice)

8 days of lunches (4 recipes served twice)

16 days of dinners (8 recipes served twice)

**Plus the mini: 5 additional meals served twice...I swap the 5 mini meals for breakfast usually.

Real Plans:

Daily smoothies

14 additional breakfast recipes that I load myself from my Recipe Box within the software

20 days of lunches from my Recipe Box

14 Days of dinners from Real Plans

4 Treat recipes (weekly) from my Recipe Box

4-8 Snack recipes from my Recipe Box

All of this leaves me fully stocked and prepared for every day. When I stick with this plan (read more about it here), I never worry about food. My budget is never broken and we never run out to eat in an *emergency* (see why here). Life is so much more enjoyable when you just get to bask in the joy of cooking when you have time and pulling out a prepared meal when you're crunched. Ahh, and the dirty dishes are much fewer too!

Are the Real Food Once a Month Cooking Recipes Good?

I want you to know that I am always brutally honest when giving my opinion on something. Once a Month Meal recipes are sometimes delicious but mostly forgettable. I have even had a few that were downright atrocious. I've learned to be highly selective in choosing the real food meal options each time I build my menu. If I were not on the Pro Plan, I could not do this and I have no idea how disastrous dinner would be! I should also say that my family is so spoiled with absolutely amazing recipes from Real Plans so Once a Month Meals had their work cut out for them when I signed up! I'm not "won over" by their recipes but I am sold on the method. We likely will not resume our membership in the next month or two when it expires. RealPlans has made a ton of new changes in the last few months that allows me to take my meal planning to the next level.

If you try RealPlans using my affiliate link, post a photo of your first recipe and tag CrunchySuperMom in it on Instagram or Facebook. Use #realfoodfast #iamsupermom and I will contact you to send you a toolkit for getting started and making the best of RealPlans. I have special recipes that I send only to my fellow RealPlans users. 

Good luck with the first real food once a month cooking menu. Let me know if you try it! It is not for the faint of heart. The cooking day is long and you will wonder why you are doing it. Be sure to take a kitchen inventory before you go shopping and use my tips here. I dread the cooking day...truth be told. But I'm quickly rewarded with carefree days and nights where my meals are ready to serve quickly and fewer loads of dishes to tame.