Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

3 Easy Ways to Get a Home Cooked Meal on the Table: Save Time and Money

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Do you cook at home?  If so, how many times a week?

Chances are, your answer will vary depending on whether or not you work outside the home, your age, and your income.

Sure, cooking at home can save you plenty of money, but not a lot of us do it.  According to Harris Interactive, “Two in five (41%) say they prepare meals at home five or more times a week and three in ten (29%) do so three to four times a week.  One in five (19%) of U.S. adults prepare meals at home one to two times a week, and 11% say they rarely or never prepare meals at home.” There aren’t always easy ways to get a home cooked meal on the table.

In the last several years, my husband and I have made the switch to exclusively eating at home.  We go out to eat less than 10 times a year, usually only when we’re traveling.  What I’ve discovered is that cooking at home can actually be A LOT of work.  Making healthy, low-cost food requires time and energy, and then there is all of the clean up to do afterwards.  If I were still working full-time outside the home, I doubt that I would have time to cook as much as I do now.

Home Cooked Meal
Original IMG credit: DSC_0719 on Flickr

However, there are a number of strategies that can help make preparing foods at home easier.

Have a go to meal.  Everyone should have a few easy meals that they can make from staples in the pantry when they’re short on time.  Choices might include spaghetti, cheese quesadillas, grilled cheese sandwiches, etc.  These meals may not be ideal nutritionally, but they’re still better than grabbing fast food, and they’ll save your wallet.

Use your slow cooker.  Start the slow cooker in the morning, and when you come home, you’ll have a hot meal waiting for you.  To save even more time, prep all of the ingredients the night before so in the busy morning, you can just dump in the ingredients and go.

Utilize freezer cooking.  Take one day a month and cook up several meals for your family for the month.  This might take you three to four hours, but then you will eliminate much of the cooking you’ll need to do for the rest of the month.  Simply take a meal out of your freezer the night before you need it and then reheat it when you get home from work.

There are short cuts to freezer meals, too.  Search Pinterest, and you’ll find crockpot freezer meals.  Simply dump the ingredients in a freezer bag and freeze.  This type of freezer cooking doesn’t require any cooking before putting it in the slow cooker, so you can make a month’s worth of meals in about an hour.

Another idea is to double any recipe you are already cooking and put the second one in the freezer for a busy night.

Don’t be discouraged if you haven’t yet mastered how to eat at home without spending all of your time cooking.  As Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of What to Eat says, “Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all.  It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is better than none” (The New York Times).

What is your favorite strategy to get a healthy meal on the table quickly?

 

Four Strategies To Get Dinner on the Table If You Are Single

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When I was a graduate student, I rarely cooked for myself.  I lived alone, and while I don’t mind leftovers, if I cooked a meal, I would have 4 to 6 servings for leftovers, and I would bore of them before I finished them.  Likewise, my mom currently lives alone, and she almost never cooks.  She always says, “What is the point of cooking for just one person?”  Instead, she goes out to eat frequently and splits a meal with her dining companion to save money.

If you live alone, you might also dislike cooking for one.  However, there are strategies you can implement to still be able to eat delicious, cost-effective meals at home, avoiding the need to rely on frozen dinners from the supermarket or restaurant food.

Pay a Friend to Cook for You.  You may have a friend who cooks for his/her family on a daily basis.  Why not ask if they would be willing to let you “buy” a serving of the meal?  I cook for my family nearly every night to keep our food costs down, and if I had a single friend, I would be more than willing to make an extra portion for her.  She could pay me $2 a meal, costing her $10 a week for 5 meals.  She would benefit because she would avoid the hassle of shopping and cooking, but she would still get a tasty home cooked meal, and I would benefit because I would just make a bit more of the meal than I was already planning to make and I would earn $40 a month for my effort (less the small cost of additional food for her portion).

Swap with Friends.  Arrange to swap meals with friends, either at work, at the gym, at your apartment complex, etc.  Get together a group of 5 friends; each night one of the five friends cooks the meal and each person gets a serving.  The only cost to you would be one evening of cooking and the groceries needed to make that meal.

Freezer Cook.   Once a month, take a day to make freezer friendly meals such as lasagna, soups, etc.  Make four meals from recipes that produce 4 to 6 servings.  You now have 16 to 24 dinners at your disposal.  Just pull them from the freezer and reheat.  If you want to increase the variety, the first month, don’t eat all of the freezer meals.  The next month, try 4 new recipes.  If you saved at least one serving from each meal you made the previous month, you now have 8 meals in your freezer rotation to choose from.  Most freezer meals are good for 3 to 6 months, so you could have quite a bit of variety by the third month.

Cook for Two.  Invest in a magazine like Cooking for Two and make meals from there.  Now, you have one serving for your meal, and one serving waiting for another meal.  Obviously, this method is a bit more time intensive than the other methods mentioned, but if you like to cook but don’t like all of the leftovers, this may be the way to go.

Even if you live alone and don’t like to cook because you get bored with the leftovers, you don’t have to rely on take out and restaurant food.  You can save a bundle by relying on one of these methods.

What are your favorite strategies when cooking for one?  Have you ever implemented any of the strategies mentioned above?

(B.B. note: Those are some terrific ideas, Melissa! As a guy, most of those ideas probably wouldn’t have ever occurred to me when I was in college.  Mostly because, as a guy, I hardly ever cooked. I know, blame me for the stereotype.  The group of guys that I hung out with, however, did do quite a bit of grilling at each others houses when we could.  When I grill now, it counts as cooking.  What we did back then?  Not nearly as much.  More of a “throw it on until it looks ready” sort of deal.)