A Lazy Person’s Guide to Eating More Meals At Home
If you read personal finance blogs long enough, you’re going to get the idea hammered into you that cooking for yourself rather than eating out all the time is a key part of getting your budget under control. But what if you’re lazy, and a crappy cook to boot? Then what?
Well, I’m lazy, and I used to be a crappy cook [occasionally still am!]. But these days, almost 100% of our meals are cooked from scratch, by me. This did not happen overnight, that’s for sure.
So, here’s what worked for me.
- Start small. Pick out some recipes online or from cookbooks and give them a whirl. Maybe on a Sunday, and you can even pack the leftovers for your lunch during the week! If it turns out, print it out or flag it to use again in the future. I don’t mind recipes with long lists of ingredients — as long as most of them are spices — but I tend to avoid ones with lengthy or complicated instructions.
- Start with simple ingredients. When you’re first starting out, you probably don’t want to be chopping up a raw chicken. I sure didn’t! Start with veggie meals or "easy to deal with" meats like hamburger, ground turkey, sausages and the like. You can work up from there. Also feel free to start with some convenience foods, even though they’re more expensive. [For instance, bags of lettuce or shredded cabbage.] It’s still [usually] cheaper than eating out, and you can transition off of them as you get more comfortable and faster in the kitchen.
- Find a good source of recipes. People always tell you to get an all purpose, generic classic cookbook like Joy of Cooking or the like, but honestly, I wouldn’t bother. I have one and never, ever use it. Instead, if I’m looking for a generic potato salad recipe, I just go to google and search on "potato salad recipe" and dig around until I find one that looks good. Additionally, Joy of Cooking and its ilk and generally not geared towards my cooking criteria: fast, cheap, good. No, you don’t have to pick two! At the bottom of this post, I will list the cookbooks that I use most often, or have found most helpful in the transition from eater-outer to cook-at-homer.
- Use the "Taco Bell" approach: six ingredients, a million meals. Thankfully at our house, we like Mexican food. As long as I have tortillas, cheese, ground meat or shredded chicken, cans of ranch or black beans, salsa, sour cream, lettuce, etc … we’ve got meals. Tacos, burritos, enchiladas, mexican lasagna, tortilla pies, taco salad, you name it. Get some eggs, and you’ve even got breakfast tacos. [This also works well with Italian/pasta.]
Here’s a typical recipe that I like, swiped from my mom. There are a million versions of this one around:
Mom’s Veggie Pizza
2 8oz refrigerator crescent rolls [reduced fat okay]
1 8oz pkg cream cheese [lite okay]
3tb mayonnaise [lite okay]
1/2tsp basil & 1/4tsp garlic powder, or a package of dry ranch salad dressing mix
Assorted finely chopped vegetables: broccoli, cauliflower, carrot, red bell pepper, tomato, celery, etc
Instructions:
Press crescent rolls into a baking sheet to form a crust. Bake in 375 degree oven 12-15 minutes. Combine cream cheese, mayo and spices. Spread thinly and evenly over cooled crust. Top with vegetable and serve.
What makes this one a winner? Well, several things. There aren’t many ingredients, and they can vary based on whatever you have on hand or what’s on sale. The instructions are broken down into easy, discrete chunks, so you can walk away from it at any time to deal with a feisty toddler and just pick back up where you left off. It tastes good and isn’t too bad for you. You can buy crescent rolls and keep them onhand in the fridge and make it as a last minute "what are we going to eat??" It’s not notably cheap, but it also sure isn’t expensive. It’s a vegetable crisper cleaner-outer.
Here’s a sample list of cookbooks and other resources that I found helpful when I was first starting out:
- Taste of Home Magazine. If you grew up middle class midwestern, this is the stuff your mom made. But it’s a nice mix of the old fashioned stick-to-your-ribs and fresher/healthier stuff. Both my mom and I have subscriptions and use a number of their recipes … we just never pick out the same stuff. Heh.
- Cheap. Fast. Good! and Desperation Dinners. — both by the same authors. The titles pretty well sum it up. I’ve made quite a few good ones from these. The Kielbasa, Cabbage and Potatoes recipe from Desperation Dinners was one of the easiest, cheapest, quickest things I’ve ever made, and it’s tasty, to boot.
- Hillbilly Housewife and Healthy Hillbilly Housewife websites. I know I’ve mentioned these many times before, but they bear mentioning again. Andrew particularly loved the African Safari Pilaf.
- The Sue Gregg Cookbooks. These are slightly more complicated than the others that I’ve mentioned [but most recipes are still very straightforward], but they also have the healthiest recipes.
- Dining on a Dime Cookbook. Wouldn’t you know, I’ve been using this cookbook for some time and only recently figured out that I regularly read the blog of the cookbook’s author?
- The Frugal Family’s Kitchen Book. This is one of my very favorites. Worth it for the cornmeal pancakes alone. I don’t even like pancakes, and I could eat the cornmeal pancake recipe every single morning. The crazy thing is that there isn’t a huge amount of recipes in here [though the ones that are in here are good], much of the value is in the lengthy commentary between the recipes.
- The Weeknight Survival Cookbook. This is a good one for when you’re just starting out and very pressed for time. Not the cheapest route to go, because it’s plans out the entire week for you without regard for sales, but it’s still a good resource. And these days, even when I don’t do the "Cook 2-3 hours on Sunday, assemble meals in 10 minutes from those parts during the rest of the week" route that it outlines, there are still quite a few recipes in there that I return to and still make. The Mediterranean Couscous is particularly good.
- Miserly Meals. The recipes in this one are not quite as good as the others, in my opinion, but it really shines in holding your hand through the process of learning how to shop and cook with an eye to frugality.
- More-with-Less Cookbook. The classic Mennonite cookbook. It’s less about being cheap than about intentionally using fewer of the Earth’s resources, but pohtayto, pohtahto.
- Saving Dinner. This has the same issue as the Weeknight Survival Cookbook above in that it’s an entire week’s worth of recipes planned out for you, but even less frugal because the week’s recipes aren’t really built around one another. [Though she does arrange recipes by season.] Meaning, every week has a fish recipe, one or two chicken recipes, a crockpot recipe, etc. So why do I even bother listing it? Well, even though I don’t think you gain very much with the intended purpose of the cookbook, some of the recipes are truly stellar. The Thai Roll-ups and the Vietnamese Chicken Salad are in high rotation in this household, and much loved. If you use Flylady, you’ve probably heard of this author.
Educating the Wheelers » Magazines said,
April 15, 2006 @ 10:20 pm
[…] These days, like I mentioned in my previous post, I get Taste of Home and I also get Backwoods Home. I finally let the subscription to my beloved Empire lapse because it’s just too crazy over-the-top expensive. And it’s not like I get out to see movies anymore. Heck, with Audrey no longer taking naps, I rarely see dvds anymore! [I haven’t even seen — or even purchased, thinking someday I might be able to see — the "new" Star Wars yet. And I’m a nerd! You don’t want to know what I did when the re-releases and other prequels came out… *sigh*] […]
Jenn said,
April 16, 2006 @ 6:56 am
Happy Easter!
Well, I disagree, I think that the Joy of Cooking is good to have on the shelf-because it explains how to do EVERYTHING. I just love winter squash (acorn, butternut etc) and I remember thinking “gee, if you can roast and eat pumpkin seeds I wonder if you can do the same with other squash seeds”. The ONLY place I could find that mentioned it was the joy of cooking (it had a recipe for roasting “pumpkin, or other squash, seeds”.
However, I wouldn’t buy a copy new. I bought my copy at the thrift store for about $1.
Also, for just general all purpose recipes, I like my “Better Homes and Gardens” and “Betty Crocker” cookbooks. They have a bit of everything. I also got a book called “How to Cook Everything” by Mark Bittman. That is a great book because it has good explainations of things like what the different cuts of meat are, then it has recipes and talks about variations of recipes and things that go well togther.
My favorite recipe site is “Recipezaar.com”. You can get a free membership and keep an online recipe file, it has nutritional info (if the orignial poster put in the sizes etc correctly), you can change the recipes between US and European measurements, and it has a star rating system with comments by other members. I especially like that-if it has 54 4star ratings, then it probably is a pretty good recipe!
Terri said,
April 16, 2006 @ 6:42 pm
Heh. My husband agrees with you re: Joy of Cooking and friends. We debated this for awhile, and I have to admit that the main reason I probably feel it’s unnecessary is because we have a computer in the kitchen. If I had to leave the room to go look up something on Google, I’d most likely rather just pull a reference off the bookshelf.
Punny Money said,
April 18, 2006 @ 5:06 am
[…] It can be hard to resist the allure of eating out. When you eat out, you don’t have to make your meal, and you don’t clean up afterwards. But even if all you know about frugality is its dictionary definition, then you know that eating out is bad for your finances. Enter Terri W. from Educating The Wheelers with a lot of useful advice for helping make dinner at home a much more pleasant prospect. When you’re first starting out, you probably don’t want to be chopping up a raw chicken. I sure didn’t! Start with veggie meals or “easy to deal with” meats like hamburger, ground turkey, sausages and the like. You can work up from there. […]
Educating the Wheelers » Festival of Frugality is Up! said,
April 18, 2006 @ 5:41 am
[…] The Nineteenth Festival of Frugality is up at Punny Money and Nick did a really great job this week. Even if you’ve never followed this Carnival before, this is the time to try it! [And, yup, I’ve got one in there this week, my Lazy Person’s Guide to Eating More At Home.] Don’t miss it. […]
Meredith said,
April 18, 2006 @ 7:11 am
What a great, comprehensive how-to! Terri, you think of everything.
SMB said,
April 18, 2006 @ 11:43 am
I like The Frugal Family’s Kitchen Book, too. When I got my copy from Amazon, I was surprised and pleased to find it was signed by the author. She has a blog, too: http://thefrugalfamilykitchen.blogspot.com/
Another of my favorites is “Good Recipes for Hard Times.” It was written in the 70s and is out of print now, but after checking it out from the library and liking it, I bought it for around $20 on Amazon’s Marketplace. I modify many of the recipes to make them more healthy (she uses a lot of bacon grease–yikes), but they all seem to turn out surprisingly well. I eat the batter bread (really just a soft-baked polenta) from this book quite often, with a side of baby spinach salad.
appleturnover said,
April 18, 2006 @ 9:55 pm
that’s great! around here things are complicated by vegetarianism and non, and a huge range of food sensitivities. this makes it difficult to eat out, so it is often easier to cook. i usually make a protein dish for each separately, then a vegetable dish or two that we can all eat, sometimes with modification for people who like or can eat ___ and we all get along just fine. usually i just have more leftovers.
i am currently trying to do some food shopping monthly, and the rest every other week. we’ve just found a bulk organics company, so going in with some friends is saving us some money that organics so rapidly takes away!
i’m really enjoying *joy* as it is my first non-veg cookbook, and helps be my mother when i can’t bother her for information. up until now i’ve been a googler too. a book in the kitchen is its own pleasure. arr, i bought it new!
exciting to read this kind of information, thank you!
*
Get Rich Slowly » Learning to Eat More Meals at Home said,
May 10, 2006 @ 10:21 am
[…] The Lazy Person’s Guide to Eating More Meals at Home is a good place to start: If you read personal finance blogs long enough, you’re going to get the idea hammered into you that cooking for yourself rather than eating out all the time is a key part of getting your budget under control. But what if you’re lazy, and a crappy cook to boot? Then what? Well, I’m lazy, and I used to be a crappy cook [occasionally still am!]. But these days, almost 100% of our meals are cooked from scratch, by me. This did not happen overnight, that’s for sure. So, here’’s what worked for me. […]
Family Resource Blog » Blog Archive » The Best Way to Save Money is to Eat In said,
May 12, 2006 @ 8:10 am
[…] Get Rich Slowly brought attention to a helpful post on the Educating the Wheelers blog entitled, Lazy Person’s Guide to Eating More Meals at Home. They stated that “Cooking at home is an excellent way to save money. But if you’re accustomed to dining out for most meals, it can be a difficult transition. Fortunately, there’s plenty of help available on the web.” The author advises that people making the transition from dining out to eating at home should: […]
Eat More Meals at Home - lifehack.org said,
May 13, 2006 @ 4:31 pm
[…] A Lazy Person’s Guide to Eating More Meals at home — [Educating the Wheelers] This entry was posted on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 2:35 am and is tagged under eating, food, hacks, howto, lifehack, money, saving . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
Deliverable » Blog Archive » African Safari Pilaf said,
May 14, 2006 @ 9:36 pm
[…] I made African Safari Pilaf tonight. (Found via the Healthy Hillbilly Housewife by way of this really good blog post on eating more meals at home). I honestly have no idea what a pilaf is, but it ended up tasting pretty good. There weren’t any vegetables so in the future I’d probably have to add a side of something green. Looks to be a recipe I could tweak out a variety of different ways. It called for “beef broth powder”, which I assume meant beef bouillon because I couldn’t find any beef broth powder in the store. I skipped that, cause it looked like it had a ton of salt. The recipe originally called for ginger but I accidentally added curry instead. Didn’t seem to be a problem. […]