The Don’t Panic Method of Cooking

This book is your guide for preparing healthy, gourmet-style meals available at a moment’s notice. We hope it becomes an invaluable tool in your cooking. Its design lets you prepare numerous meals with minimal effort, which means you will spend less time, money, and energy cooking better meals than ever. The recipes in this book have been freezer-tested and refined.

Here are five practical steps that will be helpful in making the Don’t Panic method of cooking easy to implement.

Step One: Get Started

The Don’t Panic cooking method can be implemented simply by choosing your favorite family recipe and doubling or tripling it. For example, if you are making Cranberry Chicken, triple the recipe, have one for dinner that evening, and then put the other two meals in the freezer to serve at a later time. In its simplest form, making recipes in quantity is what the Don’t Panic method is all about.

Step Two: Choose a Day

Preplanned activities that actually make it to the calendar tend to be the ones that get done. Practically speaking, this step requires looking at your daily and weekly responsibilities and choosing a block of time out of that week for cooking. This may involve a weekday morning or afternoon if you are home during the day; it may be an evening or on the weekend if you work full-time outside the home.

Step Three: Check Weekly Loss Leaders

The term loss leaders refers to items that supermarkets sell below cost and at a loss to entice you to shop at their store. The other items you buy while shopping make up for the loss the store takes on loss leaders.

Supermarkets usually rotate their loss leaders on a weekly basis. Stores will promote these items through weekly advertisements distributed in a local newspaper or through the mail. To track loss leaders, you will need to consistently consult weekly supermarket ads. You will soon know when these ads are distributed and how long a supermarket sale is effective. As you do this regularly, it becomes easier to recognize and take advantage of great loss leaders.

To illustrate how you can save big by buying loss leaders, consider this example, which uses Chicken Enchiladas as the Don’t Panic entrée. If you are cooking with two friends, you will need approximately fifteen pounds of boneless chicken. If boneless chicken is a loss leader in a local supermarket, it will be advertised at around $1.99 per pound. That’s $29.85 for fifteen pounds of chicken. On the other hand, if the chicken was purchased at the regular price of $3.99 per pound, you would have spent $59.85. By simply shopping loss leaders and planning your cooking menu accordingly, you just saved $30.00 on the meat item alone! By doing this consistently, you will never pay full price for your entrées.

Another important way to make the Don’t Panic cooking method economically beneficial is to custom package according to what your family will actually eat rather than according to the directions in the recipe. Custom packaging is described in detail in the “Packaging and Freezing the Goods” chapter. By simply shopping loss leaders and custom packaging by family size, your savings can be incredible! Each entrée included in this book should average between $3.50 and $4.25 to feed a family of four. Please note that this cost is per family, not per person.

Step Four: Choose Your Recipes for Cooking Day

After checking local ads to determine weekly loss leaders, choose one or two recipes for cooking day that use those discounted items. For example, if beef is on sale, choose beef entrées for cooking day (Teriyaki Steak and Beef Stroganoff, for example). The key is to avoid paying full price for meat items. Cook according to what is on sale!

Occasionally there will be a week when you can’t use a loss leader to cook entrées. During those weeks, you can still avoid paying full price for meat items by having a baking day instead. Choose from muffins, rolls, breads, pizza dough, cookies, or desserts. These items freeze very well if you follow appropriate packaging instructions. See “Packaging and Freezing the Goods”.

Step Five: Construct Your Shopping List

Your shopping list should be made before going to the grocery store. By using the quantity tables found in this book, you can accurately determine the amount of each ingredient you will need for each recipe. For example, if you are cooking by yourself and tripling the recipe, refer to the “x3” column for correct quantities. If you are cooking with two other people and are each tripling the recipe, refer to the “x9” column. For more grocery-shopping tips, see the next chapter, “Let’s Go Shopping!”