One of my favorite home meals growing up, we had tacos and we would sit around the table, eat together as a family, and after we would usually play cards all together and it would get real competitive. So family meals became a little complicated when my younger daughter became a vegetarian. So we discovered we all like fish, so sushi and salmon are favorite family meals. Oh my, that makes me hungry. You know, the question, what's for dinner, can often bring feelings of dread to my wife. She sometimes just freezes like, I don't know, there's got to be something here.
So maybe you've experienced that. If so, you're going to enjoy today's conversation on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller. John, today we're going to look back on a classic program all about saving time and money in the kitchen. Who doesn't want to do that? You mentioned getting ready for dinner, I'm like all in.
How soon? This sounds great. I imagine you want your family dinner time to be fun, engaging, and relaxing. Who doesn't?
But maybe you just don't know how to get there. We all have busy schedules and it seems like everyone is going in a different direction, especially at dinner time. Even with the boys out on their own now, Gene is busy most of the time and we're rushing to get to dinner. But we have carved out the dinner time as the time to be together. And we'll spend a good hour enjoying our food and talking about things, usually laughing quite a bit about those things that happen during the day. It's a wonderful time to reconnect and reset as a family.
And I want to encourage you to do that with your loved ones as often as possible. And our guest today has some great ideas on how to get ahead of the game on the food side so you have more time to spend on the relational side. Mary Beth Lagerborg is a personal historian writing memoirs for her clients and she served as director of media for Mops International for a number of years. She's written a number of books and the one we're talking about today is the best-selling once-a-month cooking Family Favorites, which she wrote with her friend Mimi Wilson. Mary Beth and her husband Alex reside in Colorado and they have three married sons and five grandchildren. Get a copy of the great book Once a Month Cooking and find out more about our guest.
We've got all the details in the show notes. Let's go ahead and hear now that classic conversation now with Mary Beth Lagerborg. Mary Beth, before we talk about cooking, let's talk about why we cook.
Sure. Food, it's interesting that God wired us the way he did, isn't it? That he created hunger in us so that we have this need to get together, cooperate, and to eat, hopefully together. Yes, and then food is so often associated with people gathering together, whether it's a family meal or you want to get together with a friend so you go out to coffee, you go out for dinner, you have them into your home.
It's just a real connecting place as well as something we have to do regularly. You started many years ago with this concept of once a month cooking, which for those of you who are not familiar with it, that means one day you cook 30 meals or more. Well, or more or less because some people don't want to cook the whole 30, but you could cook two weeks' worth. You could cook a week's worth.
But the point is that you're preparing several entrees at once and freezing them to save your time than on several days ahead in the late afternoon. Now, your co-author, Mimi Wilson, who couldn't be with us today, how did you get started? Where did you get the idea? Were you guys just frantic about this?
How were you talking about the problem? No, Mimi and I have been good friends for many years. We'd been doing some freelance writing together in the early 80s.
We each had three young children. Mimi has a gift for hospitality, and I can't overstate that. But she called me one day and she said, I've just prepared 30 entrees and frozen them. Would you like to call the Denver Post and see if they want an article? And I thought she was crazy. I really did.
I said, Mimi, why don't you call the Denver Post? And she did. And they sent a reporter and a photographer to her home to do a food feature on what we called the method. And that got us started because it was publicized and then people would call her to learn how to do it. And so we eventually wrote it up and one thing led to another.
Wow. And so what is the benefit of once-a-month cooking? The benefit is to use the time and make the mess and prepare several entrees at once. And then your time is freed up in the late afternoon for several days after that to carpool the kids or do any number of things. In fact, Mimi called me this week. She said, from the vantage point of many years into this, I'm so thankful for all the time that we had around the table and also all the time that I saved to do so many other things instead of cooking from scratch every day.
Have you ever looked at that comparison? If you look at the traditional way a meal is prepared over a month for 30 days, how many hours go into that, the prep, the shopping for it, and then when you do it all in one day or maybe two days, how much time do you really save? You know, we have never done that and it would vary a lot from person to person. However, I think as well as the time savings, there's the stress savings. I mean, you were saying, John, that terrible nagging, what are we going to have for dinner? You know, to do away with that so that you can get up in the morning, you decide what you're going to thaw, you prepare something to go with it, and it's such a stress saver.
So it's time plus the stress and actually plus the money because you can save a lot of money buying in quantity and preparing that way. And, Jim, I would think if it were me cooking, it would save hundreds of hours because I'm just so inefficient in the kitchen. Freezing hot dogs, is that what you're talking about? You'd cook a hot dog, freeze it? No. Yeah, totally. You might be a good cook, John, I don't know.
You'll never know, I guess. That's right. Mary Beth, when you look at that, of course you have the cost savings, you're efficient. So would a person, man or woman or a couple, do this on a Saturday? Do you just pull together and say, okay, today is cooking day? Oh, boy, they can do it whenever it works. But it's really important to carve out that time on the schedule because it's easy to not face it and have it go by. Of course, once you've purchased the food, you need to get on with it and do it.
But it's important to look ahead and carve out whatever time works on the calendar. And I think it's interesting you mentioned a husband and wife. It's a great thing to do with a spouse, with a friend, with a child. It's good to have a companion. It goes a lot quicker. You have someone to talk to.
It just flows better when you're doing it with someone. Describe it for us so we can get our hands around it. What would it look like typically? You go shopping, you're getting a lot of bulk items. You would not shop on the same day.
That's an energy issue and time. You would shop the day before, the evening before. If you do use the book once a month, Cooking Family Favorites, there's a well-prepared shopping list for you.
And you would choose which menu from there you want to use. You do your shopping. And then the next day, there's an assembly order that takes you step by step. You don't have to be well organized to do this.
And you also don't have to be a good cook because we'll take you by the hand and say, okay, do this and then this and then this. And the secret of it is that you're going to be doing all similar processes at once. You're going to brown the ground beef all at once. You're going to do a lot of cooking the chicken and dicing it at the same time. You're going to chop all those onions at once.
And if you think about it, how many times do you do that sort of thing over the course of a month? You're going to get that over with at once. And then you assemble the dishes one after another after another, the chicken dishes one after another, the beef dishes. There will be some meatless dishes and label them and put them in your freezer. These are entrees only?
Yes, these are the entrees only. And our thought is that if you do that, if you have the entree ready, which is the bulk of the work, then you have a little more time to maybe do a fresh vegetable. Perhaps you want to do a dessert, bake some bread, make a salad, but you have a little more time for that. Mary Beth, as you have done this for many years now, I would think, especially with a two-income family, that this methodology is extremely helpful for them because it does allow them more time around the table, takes the stress out. Mom or dad can actually relax and be with the family, not be preoccupied.
Absolutely, absolutely. And also it's easy for someone, maybe even a little older child, to take whatever it is out of the freezer and have it ready when mom and dad get home from work. But the point is to gather the family for some significant time together for dinner.
I mean, that's the bottom line there. And so for a working couple, that'd be very helpful. And Jim, that's something that we're really encouraging families to do here at Focus on the Family every day to really make an impact on your family dynamic and improve your family relationships. Having dinner together is one of them. That's something that a lot of families have just sort of let slide away. Now, John, they really have, and it's something we need to put an exclamation point on because so many people write to Focus on the Family saying, my family seems to be falling apart, what can I do?
And there's no silver bullet, we know that. But one of the things research is telling us and has shown is that when you eat together, children particularly are at far less risk for dangerous behavior, getting involved with drugs and alcohol and other things that will really cripple their development. It seems that closeness at the dinner table brings kids particularly into a relationship with their parents where they can talk about the issues of the day. And it allows the parent to really mentor the child and help them in their behavioral development. I'm sure it's not the cheeseburgers or the pizza or whatever you're eating. It's the conversation and the closeness.
And it is fascinating research, John. And if there's one thing you can do to minimize those at-risk behaviors for your kids, it's eat dinner together four or five times a week. You'll be amazed at the closeness that that develops in your family. And today we're talking with Mary Beth, of course, about how to make that simple with once a month cooking. Mary Beth, if you're preparing 30 meals for a month, that's a lot of cooking. How many hours would you put into getting 30 meals prepared? I would put probably eight hours. I would put the whole day into it.
But those are 30 entrees, 30 meals. And it will be if you space it out over the month, you're still going to save a lot of time. But it's important to plan on it taking the whole day so you're not frustrated by it because you could be in the middle of something. And if you've committed to run a carpool or something and have to stop and start again, that's difficult. So it's important to commit the whole day.
Of course, it'd be less if you're cooking a couple of weeks worth rather than the whole month. Speak to the person who is not particularly confident about their kitchen skills and talk to some of those barriers, kids, a lack of confidence. What can they do here? One thing to do is to do it with a friend because you can raise your confidence level and also not take yourself too seriously, I think, and have fun with it. You might not want to do it with a young child the first time out of the shoot with this method if you're not very confident about it.
Could be some conflict there. Well, yeah, and a lot of frustration, but maybe a second or third time. After you get it down. And I don't think I would tackle the whole month's worth if I was doing it with a child. I think maybe a week's worth or two weeks kind of hone it down a little bit.
Sure. And I think, too, that you can't get discouraged with the process going back to the importance of that regular meal time together. We all know that not every night is golden. I mean, we all have dinners that just fall apart. There's an argument or nobody likes what you've prepared or everybody's in a bad mood. And you can't let those times get you down because the thing is if you're intentional about the importance of a regular dinner time over the course of time, it's going to be a positive.
It's going to be important. Talk about some of the meals that you would prepare because obviously as an eater of those meals, I don't know about you, John, but how's the quality and what would you make? In once a month cooking?
Yes. Well, first of all, we do not do only casseroles. I think people could have that misconception and my family would not just eat casserole.
So there's a lot of variety. We have a beef pot roast. We have Texas lasagna, chicken packets.
That's a real popular one with kids. We have a marinated flank steak. We have, each cycle has an egg casserole that could be a Sunday morning breakfast or brunch kind of thing. There's just a wide variety of dishes.
So you don't have to give up your palate to do this. Asian dishes, Mexican, oh no, not at all. We really have worked on getting a wide variety of recipes in these books, but also ones that a family would eat because there's no sense buying this quantity of food and then not having a family. Perhaps with some picky eaters among the kids not like it. Mary Beth, I'm thinking also of perhaps even a single mom or single dad and maybe they're stretched financially. Is it hard to do this if you don't have a little bit extra? Well, you do need to plan for that cooking day because you're going to be spending a good portion of your grocery money at one time. To buy the food for the entrees. There'll be very little waste to it. You're going to save money by not having to resort to eating out, getting fast food, ordering in pizza.
All those events are more expensive. So you are going to save money. It takes a little planning up front to have a little extra set aside in one lump.
So again, you can start smaller, start with a week or two weeks before you get to a month. I'm wondering if you need to go out and buy a deep freeze for all this. It sounds like I'm going to come home with, well we have a lot of kids, so I'm going to come home with five or six chickens and a bunch of ground beef. Where am I going to put all that stuff? Well, I have never had a big freezer myself.
Never. And you can do it with just your refrigerator freezer if you clean it out before your cooking day. If you throw away those hard little knots of things that you threw in there and neglected. You don't have room for ice cream at first, but over the course of the month as you're using up the entrees, you do. I have an old, what was our old refrigerator freezer combination in our laundry room. So I will use that. So you don't need a deep freeze.
You don't need a deep freeze. And you know, it's because a lot of the packaging is done in freezer bags as well that you can smash flat and put on the door and that sort of thing. We're hearing some great advice from Mary Beth Lagerberg, the author, co-author actually, with Mimi Wilson of the book, Once a Month Cooking, Family Favorites. And I'm intrigued, Jim, by this whole concept here. This is something, as we said earlier, that Focus on the Family has a real interest in as we try to promote the sense of families having dinner together. This seems like a great tool to be able to lean on so you can be prepared for having a meaningful dinner time together. Well, John, good ideas don't grow old. And this is something, Mary Beth, we had you here at Focus on the Family back in the early 90s to talk about this concept. And I think thousands of people have taken advantage of this, especially when you have kids at home.
I mean, obviously, that's a time when time pressure is especially tense. So to be able to cook your meals all in one day for a month is a very good way to save your time and to be able to spend it in a way that you want to. Mimi and I have been delighted to see how many different applications there are for this as well. For example, if you are doing Once a Month Cooking and you have an elderly parent, you could package a portion of each of the dishes and take it to that parent's home and have it in the freezer. You have meals on hand to give to people, friends or family who are in need. It's an easy thing to provide a meal.
Mary Beth, why is this so novel? I mean, with all the benefits that it saves money, it saves time, it's efficient, it gives you time at the dinner time to be able to spend with your family as opposed to cooking over a hot stove. Why do people not just do this? Well, I think there's a component that's important, which is being intentional about meal time and looking forward and doing some planning ahead. Because this is a system that if you're really interested in planning ahead for meals, you're probably going to have your antenna up and be into this. And there are a number of people, quite frankly, who do this in a franchise setting, go to a storefront, separate solutions or different ones and do it that way, don't want to do it in their own kitchens necessarily. That's going to be a little more costly. Mary Beth, I'm not familiar with Supper Solutions.
What is that? Well, Dream Dinner Supper Solutions are businesses where actually they're using a method identical to once a month cooking. But you would go in and you would walk to various stations where the ingredients were there to just assemble the different entrees and you package them and you walk out ready to put these in your freezer.
Oh, okay. Is it a place where you go and cook the food or you go and get the ingredients so you can go home and cook the food? Some of it would be already cooked. You would gather the ingredients.
You would assemble it. I think that would be the word. Freezer ready. That's it. Hey, you like that? I'm learning. Perfect. Don't tell Gene.
Don't tell Gene about this. Mary Beth, let me also ask you a question about people with special diets. You know, our country, there seems to be a lot of dietary needs for different reasons.
We have restrictions, diabetes, other kinds of things. Do people that have special dietary needs, is this still an easy approach for them? What we've found is that it works very well for a family where perhaps one family member has a special dietary need so that you're not preparing two different meals at the same time every evening. For example, you would do once a month cooking for the rest of the family, if you will, and then it's a much easier thing to prepare for the person on the special diet. And in the book Once a Month Cooking Family Favorites, we do have one two-week cycle that's entirely gluten-free recipes because that was the greatest request that we had for a specialty menu, would be gluten-free. I saw that in the book before we came here in the studio when I was thinking about my 20-year-old son who's doing a gluten-free diet, and he essentially cooks all of his meals separately. And so he's really doubling up on efforts that we're already engaged in, so I appreciate that perspective. It sounds like a great way that if he were to join us in a once-a-month cooking effort, he could kind of have his stuff over here and at the same time just knock it all out, is that right? That would be great.
Yes, he could. Now I'm kind of down to the practicality, so Gene and I, maybe we've spent this day, we've had our boys helping us and we've chopped up all the chicken and we've cooked all the ground beef and we've mixed in the onions and done everything. And we've, I guess, in little small kind of Tupperware packets or Ziplocs, I don't even know what that looks like.
Ziplocs? But we've thrown it into the freezer very carefully and now it's frozen. Tell me what it's like in mealtime. I get home tonight, what am I going to do with Gene? I'm going to pull that out of the freezer?
What happens next? Well, you're probably going to pull it out this morning or somehow you need to thaw it before you heat it up. This is basic, John. Yeah, but you could have like the Tecla's lasagna. You could have that in the oven then this evening for probably 35 minutes and meanwhile throw together a salad, perhaps a vegetable, and you have dinner ready to go. You throw a lot of salads together, don't you, Gene? I can actually do that. Okay.
Yeah, you're laughing. Salads and pancakes. I can do that. We're unpacking your portfolio of recipes and kitchen skills. Now, I'm thinking Gene and I often will have special occasions at the house or something like that. Do you have another, a whole section of special occasion meals to feed 10? We don't have a special section, but in each of the menu planned, there are some dishes that serve between 8 and 12 people because we just assume that people are either going to be having some company. If they're not, they can divide it in half and freeze it in two containers and do it that way, but we do allow for the eventuality or the hope that people will be having company. Now, with all of the hope that we've been giving people that this will save you time, it'll save you money, it'll allow you more time with the family at the dinner table, what are the reasons that failure occurs here?
Over the years that you've done this, when women have written in to you, or men, saying, I just couldn't stick with it, what would they say? They may try to do too much. It does take a lot of energy. If you think about it, cooking is a lot of standing on your feet and a counter, and that can be exhausting. And sometimes people will think they might do a month's worth, whereas really their energy level would be to do one of the two-week plans. And so they've gotten too tired and they think, oh, I don't have the energy to do that again. Or they just let, it's easy to let time slip away from us.
It really is. And that's why I said at the beginning, it's important to get that time on the calendar to cook. You're always glad you've done that. But if you don't, it becomes difficult to take that slice of time and set it aside and do the cooking. Mary Beth, another thing that I caught was the way that you use once-a-month cooking to teach your kids about hospitality. Tell us a bit about that, because I think every parent wants their children to learn that, to be gracious toward others and to express hospitality. But how does this help in that? You know, to me that is so important. And I think that it's crucial to keep it on a level as simple as this. Just the idea that a warm meal and good conversation are simple, valuable gifts that anybody enjoys.
If you don't try to make it a big production, if you don't think the house has to be clean and the meal has to be just right. If I can tell you a little story. When our oldest son was living at home, he was going to school. And on the weekends in the winter, he taught snowboarding up in the mountains. One Saturday morning early, he's going out the door to go up the mountains. And I'm standing at the coffee pot in my bathrobe having a first cup. And as he leaves, he says, oh, Mom, can I bring Joe, a skiing instructor, home for dinner tonight? And I'm, oh, sure, no problem. As he goes out the door, he says, oh, did I tell you Joe used to be a chef?
And the door slams. So I'm standing there having my coffee. And I know that dinner that night is going to be meatloaf, green beans, and mashed potatoes. And I was pretty proud I don't make mashed potatoes very often. And suddenly it didn't seem good enough.
But I had a busy day. Oh, well, we're going to have to go with this. So that evening, I hear the two of them come in the back door. And this young man, Joe, who is single, probably in his 30s, he goes, wow, it smells like a family. Oh, wow.
Interesting. Didn't matter what we're having for dinner. And I think that families, particularly with young children, need to remember that it's actually an asset to smell like a family, to sound like a family, to look like a family. Don't worry about getting it all perfect. Lots of people love being embraced in that family-ness. It's not perfect, but there's something to that that's special.
Mary Beth, that is so well said. And I think I'm going to try to go home tonight and say to Jean, let's try this. Let's give this a go. Once a Month Cooking. And we're going to pick up your book, Once a Month Cooking, Family Favorites, and apply it. So if we get in trouble, can we just email you or call you?
Sure. I have had some of those calls over the years. Do you make house calls? Because we're not that far away.
For you, I would make a house call. And in fact, Jean, I think on the website, are we going to put a little cookie? We're going to go do a little cooking right now.
So that's going to be on the website as well, we hope, if it comes out right. Is that right? Yeah.
It depends if you carry your weight on this thing or not. Oh, thank you. I can chop onions. Okay.
Without crying, I think. I can't wait to see that. But it's been great to have you with us, Mary Beth. Thank you so much. And we'll look forward to having you back on so we can tell you how good it was.
Thank you. I look forward to it too. Well, what a fun look back at this classic program with Mary Beth Lagerborg. And I hope you'll employ some of her tactics about cooking for your family. We have her book, Once a Month Cooking, Family Favorites, available here at the ministry.
It is full of delicious family-friendly recipes and has three specialty areas of cooking, gourmet, summertime, and gluten-free. Donate today, a gift of any amount, and we'll send a copy of Once a Month Cooking as our way of saying thank you for supporting the ministry efforts here at Focus on the Family. Join the support team with a monthly pledge or one-time gift, and you can find all the details for giving in the show notes. Or give us a call. Our number is 800, the letter A in the word family.
800-232-6459. Have a great weekend with your family and your church family as well, and plan to join us on Monday. We'll have practical advice for how to read the Bible with your child. Our primary goal is to introduce them to Scripture.
And I think it can be done in 10 or 15 minutes a day. And for us, our strategy has been to make that a part of our rhythm. On behalf of the entire team, thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Mark your calendar to join us on October 28th through 30th right here at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs. Visit thefocusedpastor.com slash refresh for more details.
