Caring With Meals

CareCalendar is a web based system to organize meals and other help for families during a time of illness or life changing event, such as the birth of a baby or death of a family member. CareCalendar can also be used for long term situations, including homebound and caregiver respite care needs.

Lotsa Helping Hands

www.LotsaHelpingHands.com

Free, private, web-based communities for organizing friends, family, and colleagues – your ‘circles of community’ – during times of need. Easily coordinate activities and manage volunteers with our intuitive group calendar.

Meal Train

www.MealTrain.com

MealTrain.com is a free solution that simplifies the organization of giving and receiving meals. By allowing the giving party to take into account the recipient’s preferred meal times, food preferences, and available days, the site helps ensure that the recipient gets the meals they enjoy on the days that are most helpful.

Take Them A Meal

www.TakeThemAMeal.com

TakeThemAMeal.com is an free online tool for coordinating the delivery of meals to loved ones. If someone is ill, elderly, or has had a new baby, oftentimes family, friends, co-workers, church members rally around these families to take them meals. In the past, one person would coordinate (by phone or e-mail) the scheduling of the meals. Now, the meal coordinator can use TakeThemAMeal.com to allow the meal deliverers to sign up for the day or days when they will deliver meals to the meal recipients. Coordinating a meal for a group? Check out www.PerfectPotluck.com!

The Art of Helping book below includes suggestions in how to minister to people in their time of need with meals (eg. having a "casserole shower"). It also includes recipes that are quick and easy to prepare. Sometimes a need comes at short notice, and for that reason I have a substantial listing of Freeze Ahead cookbooks on this page.

The Art of Helping: What to say and do when someone is hurting

Author: Lauren Littauer Briggs, Copyright @ 2003

Lauren Littauer Briggs addresses thirty of the most common heartaches people face. She takes away our fear of involvement by helping us understand what that person is going through and provides us with a practical list of what to say--and not to say--whether it be in a face-to-face conversation with the person or through a written note or card.

Briggs also gives examples of ways other shave offered creative forms of support and comfort. Most importantly, she shares sample prayers that help the brokenhearted feel and experience the grace, healing, and comfort of a loving and compassionate God.

Recipe websites

Allrecipes.com

www.allrecipes.com

Allrecipes is the #1 place for recipes, cooking tips, and how-to food videos—all rated and reviewed by millions of home cooks.

GeniusKitchen.com

https://www.geniuskitchen.com/

Hungry for food AND good conversation? Genius Kitchen boasts a veritable smorgasbord of over 500,000 recipes and a community-inspired activity feed that allows users to share reviews, tweaks, questions and photos of their favorite recipes. Grab a plate and dig in!

Freeze ahead cookbooks

Benita Koeman of Operation We Are Here is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. When you purchase a product that is linked to Amazon, I earn a small commission which in turn helps me to continue with my mission of providing resources to the military community and military supporters. Learn more...

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Books for the military community

Operation We Are Here is a HUB of RESOURCES for the military community and military supporters.

Military support is not a concept to embrace; military support is sacrificial action. Visit our military support TOOLKIT.

Cooking Among Friends

Meal planning and preparation delightfully simplified

Authors: Mary Tennant, Becki Visser, Copyright @ 2005

Cooking Among Friends is a meal planning and preparation technique that really works! Gather a group of friends, collaborate, plan a menu of entrees, individually prepare a large quantity of a single entree (or two), freeze it in meal-sized portions and then swap! Continue with a food quantity and exhcange frequency that is ideal for the group.

Cooking Among Friends shows you how. Offering tips and strategies for forming and maintaining the group, as well as a systemized approach for determining the types of foods that will be sure to please, you'll find this book to be a solid, practical how-to. It's also packed with freezer-friendly, large-quantity recipes that will delight at mealtime.

Dinner is Ready

30 meals in one day

Author: Deanna Buxton, Copyright @ 2007

Dinner is Ready is a new cookbook designed to change your life. Learn to prepare 30 meals in just one day. With easy to read and clear instructions, this book details every aspect of the process that will put 30 meals in your freezer in one day, a fraction of the time it would take to make each of those 30 meals individually. Don't have a day to spend in the kitchen? Choose one of the shorter options!

Every meal you put in your freezer is one day of freedom in your future! With delicious dinners in your freezer - no matter how busy your day - you can always say "Dinner is Ready!"

Beautiful 240 page 6" x 9" softcover cookbook contains clear instructions plus more than 150 freezer-worthy recipes. No strange ingredients. All simple, freezable and delicious. Easy to read, large print format. One recipe to a page.

Don't Panic...Dinner's In The Freezer

A cookbook full of great-tasting meals you can make ahead

Authors: Susie Martinez, Bonnie Garcia, Vanda Howell, Copyright @ 2005

Hectic lifestyles and over-full schedules make traditional cooking methods nearly obsolete in many families. The results are poor nutrition and budgets strained by the high cost of fast food or commercially prepared meals. Don't Panic-Dinner's in the Freezer offers a simple and economical alternative, featuring dozens of recipes designed to be prepared and frozen for future use. With over 23,000 copies sold in its original self-published edition, this book gives practical tips for planning, organizing, and shopping for meals, as well as unique ways to freeze and reheat prepared foods. Every recipe includes measurements for cooking alone or as a joint venture with one or two friends. Families, singles, retirees-everyone who needs to eat-will find fast and easy answers to the question, "What's for dinner?"

Fix, Freeze, Feast

The delicious, money-saving way to feed your family

Authors: Kati Neville, Lindsay Tkacsik, Copyright @ 2010

Save time, money, and stress while serving up healthy delicious food your whole family will love. Kati Neville and Lindsay Tkacsik show you how to buy groceries in bulk, prepare easy dishes, package them in meal-sized bags, and then stock the freezer with ready-to-defrost-and-serve homemade meals. With 125 recipes that include main courses, sides, desserts, and more, Fix, Freeze, Feast is the perfect cookbook for budget-conscious shoppers, warehouse club members, and anyone who wants to put great meals on the table with less effort and expense.

Fix, Freeze, Take & Bake

101 make ahead meals for people on the go

In a life filled with families, activities, careers and friends, who has time to make a wholesome, healthy dinner? This book is filled with 117 delicious recipes for people on the go. Once prepared, each recipe can be frozen and then thawed or baked just in time to get a hot meal on the table before that next meeting or soccer practice. The Fix, Freeze, Take & Bake cookbook includes recipes for casseroles, main dishes, soups, vegetables and sides and even desserts—all that can be frozen ahead of time making it an easy fix in any time crunch! Each recipe includes detailed freezing, thawing and preparing instructions.

Frozen Assets

Cook for a day, eat for a month

Author: Deborah Taylor-Hough, Copyright @ 1999

The best-selling freezer-based cookbook, with more than 22,000 copies sold.

This breakthrough cookbook delivers a program for readers to cook a week or month's worth of meals in just one day by using easy and affordable recipes to create a customized meal plan. Deborah Taylor-Hough, who saved $24,000 on her family's total grocery bill during a five-year period, offers up kid-tested and family-approved recipes in Frozen Assets, plus bulk-cooking tips for singles, shopping lists, recipes for two-week and 30-day meal plans, and a ten-day plan to eliminate cooking over the holidays.

Cooking for the freezer allows you to plan ahead, purchase items in bulk, cut down on waste, and stop those all-too-frequent trips to the drive-thru. The hands-down authority on once-a-month cooking, Frozen Assets gives you a step-by-step plan to simplify and revolutionize the way you cook.

Frozen Assets Lite and Easy

Cook for a day, eat for a month

Author: Deborah Taylor-Hough, Copyright @ 2002

Low-fat, lower-calorie bulk cooking from bestselling author Deborah Taylor-Hough.

Through the bestselling cookbook Frozen Assets, Deborah Taylor-Hough became known as the "once-a-month" cooking expert. She taught people how to increase time at the family table while decreasing time in the kitchen and drive-thru lanes. She also saved more than $24,000 over a five-year period and taught readers to do the same.

In Frozen Assets Lite and Easy, Taylor-Hough is back with a book of lowfat, lower-calorie meal plans that use the same time-saving and cost-effective methods. Why cook every night when you can cook once a week for seven (or more) delicious, healthy, family-approved meals? Frozen Assets Lite and Easy shows readers how to be healthy while still saving time and money, with shopping lists, recipes, and detailed instruction on how to make freezer cooking work for you.

Lunch is Ready

30 meals in one day

Author: Deanna Buxton, Copyright @ 2007

Do you need a solution to lunchtime monotony? Freeze a variety of lunch favorites and truly enjoy lunchtime, whether at work, school or at home.

Every day around noon you are faced with the same question, "What's for lunch? Do you cringe at the thought of another boring sandwich? Do you spend too much money on fast food?

Here you will find dozens of really great lunch choices, all that can be made in advance and frozen, ready for you to enjoy with very little time or effort spent in the kitchen.

Unique and simple family friendly lunch recipes. Instructions for preparing and freezing meal-size lunches plus many single-serving ideas. Serve lunch for one or for many in just minutes.

With delicious lunches in your freezer, you can always say, "Lunch is Ready!"

Beautiful 295 page 6" x 9" softcover cookbook contains clear instructions plus more than 200 delicious freezer-worthy lunch recipes. No strange ingredients. All simple, freezable and delicious. Easy to read, large print format. One recipe to a page

Once-A-Month Cooking Family Favorites, Revised and Expanded

A proven system for spending less time in the kitchen and

enjoying delicious, homemade meals every day

Authors: Mary Beth Lagerborg, Mimi Wilson, Copyright @ 2007

Since the first edition of Once-a-Month Cooking was published in 1986, its proven, practical method has helped hundreds of thousands of families reduce their cooking time and still enjoy nightly home-cooked meals. You don’t have to be a super savvy chef to pull your family together each week for these light and simple, easy-to-prepare meals. Revised to reflect today’s healthier diet, this revised edition explains how to: plan ahead, spend less time at the supermarket, cut down on prep time, group similar kitchen tasks together to get them all done at once, make kitchen clean-up more manageable, and use the freezer, computer, and your head to create a month full of delicious meals!

Contains many easy, prepare-ahead recipes for dinner time success such as:

Baked JambalayaMexican

Chicken Lasagna

Chicken Taco Salad

Slow Cooker Cranberry Pork

Veal Scaloppini

And more!

Whether you are a busy parent on the go or you just want a quick dinner to warm your spirit, you’ll be instantly hooked on this cookbook classic and its fool-proof Once-a-Month Cooking method!

Once-A-Month Cooking Family Favorites

More great recipes that save you time and money from the

inventors of the ultimate do-ahead dinnertime method

Authors: Mary Beth Lagerborg, Mimi Wilson, Copyright @ 2009

Mimi Wilson and Mary Beth Lagerborg are back with a brand new book that features their Once-A-Month Cooking ™ technique guaranteed to save time and money. Filled with all-new cycles - two one-month cycles, two two-week cycles, and three specialty cycles: gourmet, summer, and gluten-free – their trademark method remains the same: You shop for an entire cycle all at once, buying in bulk and saving money. You do all the food prep for the cycle the next day, freezing and refrigerating what needs to be kept cold, stocking the pantry when appropriate. Then, as the family assembles for mealtime, you do some quick finishing and it’s ready - fast and delicious! Once-a-Month Cooking™ Family Favorites has something for every kind of eater and includes such soon-to-be favorites as:

Adobe Chicken

Baked Mediterranean Cod

Chicken Wild Rice Soup

County-Style Ribs

Texas-Style Lasagna

With the perfect plan in hand and bulk shopping at economically-friendly prices, the Once-A-Month Cooking ™ technique is a surefire way to get a delicious dinner on the table fast so that you can spend more time with your family!

On the Side

30 meals in one day

Author: Deanna Buxton, Copyright @ 2007

Once you've chosen a main dish for dinner, do you ever wonder, "What shall I serve with this?" There are always the old standbys to fall back on but some recipes scream for something more than boring rice or plain pasta. On the Side is a collection of recipes that are simple, fun, and fabulous that will add delicious variety to your meals.

Every side dish category is covered: Vegetables, Rice, Pasta, Salad, Dressings & Sauces, Bread, and a category called "Everything Else" for the recipes that don't quite fit in the other categories.

This book includes a handy Menu Guide that matches appropriate side dishes with each meal in Dinner is Ready. Plus a suggested Complete Menu is on every recipe in the book. Use the suggestions or mix and match recipes according to your own preferences. There are endless fabulous combinations.

Whether you make them now or freeze them for later, whether you use the menu guide for side dish suggestions for recipes from Dinner is Ready, or you just want more choices of side dishes, you'll find these recipes a welcome change from boring pasta, plain rice, or humdrum green salad. And no more wondering, "What shall I serve with this?"

Beautiful 400 page 6" x 9" softcover cookbook contains more than 350 side dish recipes. Many can be frozen - all simple fun and fabulous. Easy to read. Large print format. One recipe to a page.

The Everything Meals For A Month Cookbook

300 recipes to help you plan ahead, save time, and stay on budget

Author: Linda Larsen, Copyright @ 2005

You don't have to order take out every time you don't feel like cooking--now there's an easier way to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner (not to mention dessert) right at your fingertips! The Everything Meals for a Month Cookbook is the perfect tool to help you save time in the kitchen (and money in your wallet!) with practical shopping tips and food handling tricks for buying and cooking in bulk. Learn how to plan your menu, assemble the ingredients, and store and freeze a month's worth of dinners-without losing any freshness or taste.

In addition to 300 mouth-watering recipes, The Everything Meals for a Month Cookbook explains how you can organize your kitchen for once-a-month cooking. Thanks to the easy-to-follow bulk-cooking model provided, it's easier than you think!

The Freezer Cooking Manual from 30 Day Gourmet

A month of meals made easy

Author: Nanci Slagle, Copyright @ 2008

Best of the freezer cookbooks! This comprehensive cooking system teaches busy cooks how to fill their freezers with nutritious and great tasting foods! Spend a few hours or spend a whole day.

This hands-on manual includes time-saving worksheets, step-by-step instructions, healthy tips, money-saving ideas and practical advice. Nutritional information and member access to hundreds of additional online recipes included.

The manual also features: demonstration photos

easy-to-follow steps

worksheets

choosing recipes for freezer cooking

shopping smart

assembling in quantity

freezing for great results

thorough appendix with equivalency charts

metric conversion charts

freezing time chart

blanching chart

list of basic cooking terms

freezer selection and maintenance

power failure procedures

Why choose 30 Day Gourmet?

We have a website and will answer your questions

We TEACH you how to be a great freezer cook. We don't just give you recipes and hope that you can figure the rest out.

Our cookbook is a manual. It teaches you how to freezer cook and it provides the tools that are necessary for you to do it any way you wish. Our worksheets (available free online with a book purchase) help you do all of the calculating. We also give you instruction in how to incorporate your own recipes into the system.

Our recipes are always multiplied out in the same way. We have saved you a bunch of time and headaches by doing this work for you. It helps you make multiples in an efficient way. Our recipes also are based on 6 servings per entree. It's hard to plan your cooking when some recipes have 4 servings and some have 12.

30 Day Gourmet gives you great help along with tons more recipes on our website. Our message boards offer help, stories, recipes and the expert advice of hundreds of seasoned freezer cooks.

The 30 Day Gourmet yahoo group is now #3 in the Cooking and Recipes groups with over 11,600 members. Join for free and we will send you a newsletter every month filled with tips, info and more freezer recipes.