One of the grocery stores around here (a Price Chopper, maybe?) has a "cooking class" thing on weekends that's more like bulk meal preparation. You prep a whole

One of the grocery stores around here (a Price Chopper, maybe?) has a "cooking class" thing on weekends that's more like bulk meal preparation. You prep a whole bunch of the meal you signed up to make, and get some number of family-portioned bagged-to-freeze meals with minimal extra work required when it comes time to cook them. So you very efficiently make a bunch of one thing but get some servings of four or five different meals (you get to pick which ones you want). You pay in based on what you want to take home. The cost is often under what it'd take to buy the ingredients for it, somehow. My wife does it every so often, the results are great and it takes way less time than the combined shopping and prep/cooking would for the same number of meals. [EDIT] reworded sentence to make it clearer.