To eat in or eat out. But before you choose eating out take this into consideration.
My wife doesn’t cook (at least not all that well) and she really doesn’t have the time, holding down a fulltime job and raising two boys to cook during the week so,
Every evening instead of cooking, we go to different places to eat. Not restaurants necessarily but driveups like Sonic drive inn,Pizza Hut and Subway. We usually spend somewhere around $8.00 -$12.00 on that meal which usually includes 3 of us my wife, my 10 year old and me.( my older son is on his own.) Sometimes we splurge and go to a local restaurant and spend $20.00 but rarely during the week.
So my question is would it be cheaper ( considering the work of cooking) to cook a meal and eat in? I was just wondering how much I might be saving if my wife really loved to cook and we ate in all the time.
I vote eating out. I mean, why buy all of that food just so I can throw it in the trash after trying to prepare it, when I could have gone to Taco Bell for .79…
Buy a crockpot!!
I can get a big hunk of corned beef, throw it in there with some potatoes and cabbage, and put some frozen peas in the microwave for under $15 and it’s enough food to last us two days. This is one of our more expensive meals, too. There’s hardly any effort to throw some meat and a bunch of vegetables in there in the morning (max 10 minutes prep time). When we get home from work, dinner’s ready.
I definitely think it’s cheaper to eat in and much more nutritious. Is your son really getting enough vegetables eating at Sonic every night?
It is soooo much cheaper to eat in. We are a family of 4. Every 2 weeks we go to the supermarket and buy about 120$ worth of groceries. These groceries include breakfast, lunch and dinner plus household items such as detergent and Glad plug-ins. So lets say 1/3rd of our grocery bill goes to dinner. That’s 40$ for two weeks worth of dinners!
Two weeks minus two days because we like to go out to dinner as a family on Fridays where we blow the equivalent of a week’s worth of dinners in one night.
I know for myself, I can either spend $5 on a take-out dinner, or spend $3 for a Create A Meal, $1.50 for fake ground beef (vegetarian…) and I have two big meals or three little ones. Much cheaper to eat in.
Definitely cheaper to eat in, and certainly healthier. The crock pot is an excellent idea. I use mine at least 4 times a week in the winter, when it’s cold there is nothing like coming home to a house filled with the smell of a hot dinner cooking. In the summer I go more with salads and I cook my meat on the gas grill. You don’t have to be a chef to fix a meal. Hamburgers prepared at home are much better for you than from a fast food place. Subway sandwiches are a pretty good choice if you have to eat out.
** Sigh. So many men, so few who can afford me ** Original by Wally
I’ve learned that if someone says something unkind about me, I must live so that no one will believe it.
First, to the OP-
It is MUCH cheaper to cook then to eat out.
Second, I totally understand how hard it is to make dinner when you’re really tired or busy. If you wife can e-mail me, I’ll be happy to send her a few great crock pot recipes that involve doing the following:
unwrap some meat
put it in the crock pot
put some liquid in
turn it on
You come home from work and you have a nice hot meal! A ten year old is old enough to help out a little, too. When everyone is getting ready for dinner, I think a 10 year old can open a can of veggies and put them in the microwave. Or set the table. Everyone can contribute a little bit to the dinner effort. Try it just one day a week, then work up to more.
Zette
“If I had to live your life, I’d be begging to have someone pop out both my eyes. Just in case I came across a mirror.” - android209 (in the Pit) Zettecity
Voted “Most Empathetic”- can you believe that?
I have to go with the eating at home crowd. It is so much cheaper, and there are a lot of ready to eat/ready to fix type foods out there, that you don’t have to be a good cook to eat at home. I love to cook, but don’t have much time lately, so these are a good alternative. We still eat a nutritious, well balanced meal that’s hot, but the prep time is far less.
Another thing I like to do, in addition to these and the crockpot is to make up large batches of food, freeze single meal size servings, and I have spaghetti, for example, for 3-4 meals that way, and only cook it once.
You are more than a human being, you are a human becoming.
Og Mandino
That’s my name, not a description. I am neither purple nor a bear. Okay, so I’m purple.<a true Wally original!>
Aha, a steady diet of fast food is gonna kill you all before you hit thirty. Or forty, or whatever your next milestone is.
It takes fifteen minutes or less to steam some broccoli, from turning on the range to putting it on the table. Okay, I don’t like eating it any more than you do, but you better get some of it in you at least once a week. Some nice olive oil and fresh lemon juice schpritzed over it makes it palatable.
Got it down? Good. Later, we’ll talk about spinach and beets and cabbage and cauliflower and brussels sprouts and carrots and squash and green peas and lima beans and all those other things you should be putting into your body on a more or less regular basis.
The cheapest is always to eat in an prepare everything yourself.
Next is eating in and using convenience foods.
Most expensive is eating out.
Remember, if you’re eating out, you’re paying not only for the food, but for the salaries and benefits of the people who prepare it. Granted your own time isn’t factored in when you think about eating in, but you should be able to put together a decent dinner in half an hour, which is pretty much the amount of time it’ll take you to go out to a restaurant. Even picking up McDonald’s on your way home (and assuming no detours), it’s going to take 5-10 minutes to get the burgers. So you’re not really saving all that much time.
Cooking isn’t all that hard. Most vegetables just need to be heated. Potatoes take an hour baked in the oven (375 degrees) and fifteen minutes if sliced and boied (mash them and add a little milk). Pasta boils until its soft, then you add whatever sauce you want. Meat needs to be cooked, but not overcooked; any good cookbook can tell you how. Once you master the basice, you can move on to more complicated dishes.
“What we have here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin, anticipating the Internet.
Well I am a public school music teacher. I rotate 125 kids a day (2-5) through my room per week. That’s 600 kids a week that receive choral music instructions from me. Besides that I put on 4 nighttime concerts per year featuring all the grades and then I have an after school honor choir twice a week. That enough jobs fer ya?
I do like to grill and we do that during the 2 months we are off during the summer cause there are just so many fast food joints one can eat in and not go loonie. Tonight we ate at pizza hut…terrible service and the ham and cheese was not very good. But I do have a salad with almost every meal if they serve one and most places do. I guess we will continue to spin the fast food wheel until summer vacation in late May.
It is cheaper to eat in, and if you get your kids involved in the planning of meals/cooking and cleaning up, they learn important lessons in life by being involved with you.
Spaghetti isn’t that time consuming of a meal to fix, using the same kind of ground round in the spaghetti, fix ahead chili, so it only has to be warmed up by any member of your family.
I buy in bulk from Sam’s Club, and then split things up into family size portions. Like the large chicken breast package would be cut up four ways. I’ll put barbeque sauce in one, lemonade concentrate with another, Italian Dressing in another package. The last one, I’ll use orange juice, or cut it into smaller pieces and put it in Chinese on the stove top meals. None of those takes more than an hour on the day they are used.
I get those items during the week, and prepare them ahead of time, so they are ready to pop in the oven. Toss a salad and you can sit around with your family and talk…or go play on the computer!!
Introduce her to once a month cooking. I do this differently than most, but the jist is: Instead of making one lasagne, make two (same ingredients, same cleanup, 2 minutes more work). Cook one, freeze the other…two dinners made in one night.
Make pasta sauce, double the amounts, freeze it in single dinner size servings. Go buy lots of plastic containers and freezer bags!
Make chili, double the normal amount, freeze half for another day.
Make seasoned taco meat. Make 4 pounds worth! Eat one pound in tacos that night, freeze three pounds in three bags.
Do this for a month, then you don’t have to cook (just defrost and heat) for another month. I did it for about six weeks before I had my daughter and it was great!!! After she was born, I didn’t cook (okay, I made salads) for two months!
I’ve found that most anything can be adapted to OAMC (called that because some people actually do 30 dinners in one day, freeze it all). I prefer the slow stocking up method. Here is a site to get you started: http://members.aol.com/oamcloop/index.html
Good luck!
My kids brighten up our home. They never turn the lights off. -A Wallyism
