Cooking at home always seems like a good idea when you’re charting out your monthly budget. You know that cooking at home is cheaper than eating out, and you probably even like the idea of sitting down to a family meal together. The problem comes into play when it’s 6 PM, and you haven’t even started dinner yet. How do you resist that temptation to just gather everyone up and shuttle them off to McDonald’s or Applebee’s?
Create a Weekly Menu
The first key to keeping up your motivation to cook at home is to have a plan. The worst question to be stuck with on your way home from work is “What am I going to fix for dinner?” You can avoid this dilemma by creating a menu plan for the entire week all at once. Create your plan on Sunday (or whatever works for your family’s schedule). Then, shop for the entire plan. Now, it will be easier for you to go home and cook dinner than it is to start all over again and decide where you’ll go out to eat.
Do the Prep Ahead of Time
The next key to motivating yourself to cook at home is to prep as much of your dinner as you can in the morning before you leave for work. No one wants to work eight hours and then come home to prepare a meal that will take two hours to cook. However, if you know you already put that casserole together and that all you have to do is pop it into the oven, cooking dinner at home seems much more hassle-free.
Remove Temptations
Finally, one other key to staying motivated to cook at home is to remove the temptation to spend extra money on eating out. Once you decide what your allowance for food is for that week, place that amount of cash into an envelope. Take that envelope with you and use that money when you purchase your week’s groceries. Now, whenever you’re stricken with the temptation to eat out that week you can simply look into the envelope and see if there’s enough money to eat out there. If there’s not, you know you can’t eat out.
Often, many people choose to eat out because it just seems so much easier than cooking at home. However, if you plan and prepare your meals you can remove, or at least minimize, a lot of the obstacles to cooking at home. In no time at all, you’ll wonder why you ever preferred to eat out.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post! I’m a haus frau, but sometimes get so wrapped up in projects (we’re avid do-it-yourselfers) I’m too lazy/tired to cook or haven’t planned ahead and have nothing thawed. One of my tricks is keeping a skillet meal or two in the chest freezer for such emergencies. I also keep one or two frozen small pizzas on hand so my oldest son doesn’t try to talk me into going to the gas station for pizza.
As part of the prepping ahead of time, when I’m really on the ball, I’ll boil, cube and freeze chicken in 2 cup increments for meals – all they need is to be thawed out and tossed in whatever meal. I also freeze ham the same way (when I make ham, I buy it larger than we need for the purpose of freezing it).
Im a terrible cook. I should learn more about it. Keep putting it off.
I’ve learned that my wife doesn’t mind making meals, it’s the clean-up afterwards that she doesn’t like. I’ve made it my goal to make sure the dishwasher is loaded and the kitchen is clean before we all leave the kitchen to watch tv or whatever. This has helped quite a bit.
Last night we made meal plans. My wife gave everyone in the family two meal choices for the next two weeks.
I couldn’t agree with you more!
We only end up eating out when we haven’t communicated properly and planned out our weekly menu. When it is posted on the fridge with the list of things ready to go, it just takes the mental work out of it all.
Excellent site! I do love any excuse to save money.
Deliah
I have the hardest time with the temptations. There are just so many easy excuses that “justify” why eating out makes sense. Things like,
“It’ll save me time.”
“I’ll just do it today and eat at home tomorrow.”
“My friend asked me to go out to dinner who I haven’t seen recently.”
It’s so easy to make excuses! But your tip to do prep-work ahead of time really helps me whenever I actually get around to doing it. Great tips.
This is a great post. After we lost an income a couple of years ago. We had to start cooking at home. Well it was a very good lesson. The food we plan and eat now, is so much healthier, and far cheaper. Even though the income has returned, the frequent eating out has not.
Great post! and it’s so true. I find if I plan ahead and buy everything for the week, and plan what meals I am having on which day I am much more inclined to cook it. Especially if I’ve defrosted meat. Wouldn’t want it to go to waste! It definitely saves me from getting lazy at the end of the day!