Well, the vote is up to you. What did you think of the April lunch items? Which was your favorite. Feel free to leave comments below but make sure that you “officially” vote in the right side bar. Can’t wait to see the results!

And don’t forget to vote for Once A Month Mom for Tastiest Food blog. Voting goes on until July 6th. You can vote everyday. And yes, we plan on bugging you every day until then. We want to win afterall. Thanks for your support. Follow the link or click on the button in the right side bar. (I have had the most success using Firefox as the browser for this site. Many others have reported problems using other browsers.)

I hope that you had a good March cooking experience and are looking forward to April! If you are new to the site this month, WELCOME. We are glad that you have decided to join us. Here is what you will need to participate in the Arpril OAM Cooking BIG DAY! Not sure how to get started, read here.

Spring is here and we are gearing up for great weather (I hope)! Our menu should reflect that as well. We have taken a look at the specials, sales, and in-season produce to try to bring you a diverse and fresh new menu! I hope you like what you see!

We also have a couple new resources that we have added! Last month we debuted the new printable labels, those are included in the new April menu as well. We have also added a PODCAST to our monthly menu post. This is a short (approximately 11 minutes) tutorial on the menu items we have chosen, their origin, why they were chosen and some helpful hints on navigating through the grocery list and recipes. We hope that you enjoy the podcast feature and hope to bring you more exciting information via future podcasts!

April Podcast – NEW!!

• Listen in the orange player at the top of this post…

April Menu

• Included below are the menu items that we will be preparing as part of our OAM Cooking BIG DAY. In the printable menu the menu items are listed as single, double, or quadruple depending on how much we need to make on the BIG DAY. The recipes linked below are ONLY for the single batch, to see the amounts we are making on the OAM BIG DAY you will need to visit the April Printable Menu.

• Breakfast

  • Chocolate Chip Cream Cheese Coffee Cake
  • Egg Muffins
  • Frozen Fruit Cups

• Lunches

  • Ham & Potato Pockets
  • Zesty Slow Cooker Chicken Barbecue
  • Cheddar Butter Burgers**
  • Chicken Pesto Spinach Salad

• Dinners

  • Hammy Cheese
  • Ham & Hashbrown Bake**
  • Pizza-Stuffed Meatloaf
  • Burritos
  • No Fuss Chicken Cordon Bleu**
  • Maple Honey Mustard Pork Chops**
  • Beef Fajitas** (Don’t Panic Recipe)
  • Orange-Apricot Pork Chops**

• Printable April Menu

**Indicates meals that require NO COOKING on your OAM Cooking BIG DAY!

Grocery List

• Included in this spreadsheet you will find a listing of all the items you will need to complete your April OAM Cooking BIG DAY. For more instructions on how to use this, go here.
• Printable Grocery List

Instructions

• These are the step-by-step instructions you will need to quickly and efficiently approach your OAM Cooking BIG DAY!
• Printable Instructions

Labels – NEW!

Designed to be printed on Avery 8163 or equivalent! Readers who didn’t have labels available suggested just printing them on paper and taping them. Cheap and economical; I like it!

• April_Labels_1 – Chocolate Chip Cream Cheese Coffee Cake, Egg Muffins
• April_Labels_2 – Frozen Fruit Cups, Ham & Potato Pockets
• April_Labels_3 – Zesty Slow Cooker Chicken Barbecue, Cheddar Butter Burgers
• April_Labels_4 – Chicken Pesto Spinach Salad, Hammy Cheese
• April_Labels_5 – Ham & Hashbrown Bake, Pizza-Stuffed Meatloaf
• April_Labels_6 – Burritos, No Fuss Chicken Cordon Bleu
• April_Labels_7 – Maple Honey Mustard Pork Chops, Beef Fajitas
• April_Labels_8 – Orange-Apricot Pork Chops, Blanks

Helpful Hints

• Tips from Once A Month Mom’s Tricia and Cortney AFTER their OAMC day.
• Tips and Stories from other readers.

What do you think of April’s menu?

And don’t forget to check out the right sidebar weekly to vote on past month’s menus!

My poor overstuffed freezer!

I can hardly believe that Cortney and I did another cooking day. Except now I have an overflowing freezer to prove it so there is no denying. Folks, I think it is fair to say we here at Once A Month Mom have a problem. A good problem, but a problem none the less. We have TOO MUCH food. I think I might run a clearance sale on our entrees when we get back just so I can open the freezer without stuff falling out on me.

What you are really looking for is the menu recap and helpful hints for navigating through this month’s menu. So here it is:

1. Due to vacation circumstances (and lack of refrigerator and freezer space)my husband and I put together the pork chops when I arrived home from the grocery store with them. 48 pork chops is A LOT. It is enough for 6 pork chops per entree. I was thinking that this would be good for those men who like to eat an extra one but once we got them home I realized that 6 is way too many for us to eat at one sitting. So we packaged them into bags of 3 each. We figure if we have company than we will just defrost two packs. They look and smell really good though.
2. The pizza-stuffed meatloaf looks and smells amazing. I made it tonight and shared it with another couple so that we didn’t have a bunch of leftovers in the refrigerator. I thought it was quite tasty.
3. I waited to cut the ham until the day we were cooking because I had already done the pork chops (and honestly – don’t you think Cortney needs to a do a little work? I did. he he). I wish I hadn’t done that though. It took me forever to cut! So cube your ham beforehand.
4. I would also mix the pasta salad in two large stockpots, or even 4 if you have them available. It is A LOT of pasta!
5. We also decided that the Chicken Cordon Bleu would be better in deep dish pans. I have changed this on the menu card and in the grocery list. So you may want to take note. We didn’t have extra deep dish but we did have extra regular 8×8 pans so I put the ham & hashbrown into 8 8×8’s instead of 4 deep dish. Yea that really helped the freezer space issue! *sigh*
6. Other than that, all things went rather smoothly. My husband was watching my son at the house which I again, would NOT recommend. It is just too easy to get distracted.
7. As for $$$, we spent $146.91 each, which is actually more than we spent the month we did seafood. HOWEVER, we made more meals (42) because of the pork chops and pasta salad making so much. So our per meal total was $3.49.

Hope you have a great OAMC experience this month and we look forward to hearing your stories.

Final April Grocery List

Here is a picture recap of some food I was able to take. If you click on the picture you will see a description. You can then scroll through by mousing over the left or the right of the picture.