Most people don't really hate cooking — they just hate the pressure of coming up with something for dinner every night of the week.

Here's Jenny Stanger's solution for the 5 p.m. "What's for dinner?" panic: Every two weeks she spends two hours preparing two recipes, with each recipe large enough to make three family-size dinners.

"You can build up a good supply of dinners in your freezer this way," said the Pleasant Grove mother of three. She teaches a "Freezer Dinner" cooking class at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi and Ace Hardware in North Salt Lake, and she has a Web site, freezerdinner.com.

On the nights you feel like cooking, you can. But when you don't feel like it, use those "frozen assets" in the freezer.

"I believe that you need to have one meal a day for the family to sit down and enjoy," said Stanger. "Making freezer meals has given me more time with my family because there's less cleanup."

Most home cooks already do freezer meals in a limited form, such as making a double batch of lasagna and freezing half for later. Several cookbooks have expanded on the idea, such as "Frozen Assets: How to Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month," by Deborah Taylor-Hough (Sourcebooks, $14.95), and "Once-A-Month Cooking," by Mimi Wilson and Mary Beth Lagerborg (St. Martin's Griffin, $12.95).

But Stanger doesn't advise making a month's worth of meals in one cooking session. "I tried 'Cook for a Day and Eat for a Month,' but it seemed like I was actually prepping for a month," she said. "I think I spent four nights just chopping vegetables. It seemed impossible when I only had one set of pots. And it was hard setting aside that amount of time. Maybe you can get faster at it as time goes on."

Stanger outlines her own strategy in her self-published book, "Fantastic Freezer Recipes," sold on her Web site.

No matter how you do it, stockpiling frozen dinners offers some advantages:

• Your time is spent more efficiently. By chopping all the vegetables at once, you've saved the time it takes to get out and clean up the cutting board or food processor, for instance.

• Cost savings. "Cooking this way saves us $200 to $300 a month," said Stanger. You make fewer trips to the market, which discourages impulse shopping. And you can take advantage of bulk pricing and sales. Stanger suggested buying a whole ham and having the butcher dice it into cubes to use in casseroles, omelets, pizzas and so on.