I'd forgotten how much I love bulk cooking! A friend of mine needed a little help this week, so I offered to bring her a few meals. I figured that since I was cooking, I might as well make a little for my family as well. Who knew I'd be back on the bulk cooking bandwagon after it?See, I've been a bulk cooker for three years now. But when I started working so much, especially in the evenings, our stash of pre-cooked meals dwindled very quickly. My husband lovingly took up the meal-making duties, but for us that has mainly meant frozen pizzas, Lean Cuisines, chicken nuggets and other quick-cook prepackaged meals. Not exactly healthy, and not exactly appetizing after a couple of months. I always meant to do a Big Cook again (where I prepare 45 meals in three days) but somehow the time never materialized. And so the busy-family cycle has perpetuated, even though I know better.Some of you are newish here and haven't heard me talk about bulk cooking before. What is bulk cooking? Simply put, it's making more than one meal at once. It can be as simple as tripling or quadrupling a meal you're already making, or doing that multiple times over with eight to 10 different recipes over a couple of days. When I do the latter, I call it a Big Cook. With basic bulk cooking I can put away three to four meals in under an hour. Think about it - the majority of the time you spend cooking is usually on the prep and cleanup - so why not multiply that meal and save an hour later in the week? In a Big Cook I can easily take nine hours (three hours a day over three days) and put away 45 meals. I found that bulk cooking not only saved me time, but it saved me money as well, since I'm not needing to eat out or use expensive convenience foods as often.Back to tonight. My friend calls, and I offer to make her a few meals. I start pulling out ingredients and think "Why shouldn't I just make a few things at once that go well together?" So I start. I put on a double batch of triple mushroom bisque (makes nine meals), a triple batch of lemon garlic chicken (makes three dinners) and three roasted whole chickens (makes six meals plus four lunches of chicken salad). I spent an hour chopping and sautéing mushrooms, stuffing chickens, chopping roasting potatoes and prepping the chicken thighs for the roasting pan. I set it all to simmer/roast, and walked away to type this up! (The three whole chickens go into one very large roasting pan on the bottom rack of the oven, the lemon garlic chicken is up top in the same oven, and the bisque is on top of the stove. No special equipment needed to cook all of this!)An hour's worth of work, another 90 minutes of roasting (where I wasn't doing anything), and I had more than 15 meals ready to package and freeze! (So maybe two hours' worth of actual work once I package it all.) Someone remind me why I don't do this more often??