eating out too much! help!

[LennyOnPs3]

ok i just realized how much my wife n i spend on food. we're spending about $240 every paycheck (twice a month) on FOOD. ok here's our excuse, i DO NOT know how to cook and my wife can only cook a few things. so i ask..how do we get out of spending $105 in groceries ( gatoraide, milk, oj, eggs) and spending $120 on FAST FOOD. we usually eat breakfast at home (cereal,toast etc) but lunch and dinner are the problems.

lunch is ALWAYS fast food (mcdonalds, BK, pizza, taco bell) and dinner would also sometimes be fast food or eggs with rice or whatnot.

my question is...where can we get ideas on what to cook and how to cook? i would like to spend about $300 a month on just food bought from sam's club and somehow cook it. but like i mentioned. we cant cook too well and dont know how to cook much of anything. please help!

[sweeps]

Speaking from experience... it's a hard habit to break. But figuring out how much you're actually throwing away on eating out is the first step.

Breakfast is pretty easy as you've found. Lunch isn't too bad either. There are always sandwiches -- I hope you can make a sandwich.

As far as dinner is concerned, you don't have to start from scratch. Start with something like frozen pizza -- buy a Jack's cheese pizza and cut up tomatoes or mushrooms or whatever you want and put it on top before baking it. Boil pasta and throw in Ragu. There are lots of things like this.

As you get more confidence (and get bored with those meals), you can get more creative. For example, instead of Ragu, you could make your own pasta sauce.

[LennyOnPs3]

what we're thinking of doing is buying some foods like frozen chicken breast and some frozen fish (doesnt sound good but tried it at sam's club the other day at the "free samples" booth and tasted pretty darn good)

but i know we'll eventually get bored of eating fish one day, eggs another, and chicken another. so what to do then??

[sweeps]

Just a few comments... the first is kinda off-topic. I'm not a big fan of the warehouse clubs. You'll obviously be better off than eating out. But many times you can get ripped off buying things at Sam's or Costco or whatever. Be careful. If you want chicken for example, watch the grocery store fliers for when it goes on sale -- that's often a better deal.

I'm not sure if you're one of those people who thinks a meal has to have meat or it's not really a meal. I'm not one of those people, but I know a lot of people are. How about vegetarian lasagna or tortellini. How about a "breakfast dinner" -- make pancakes and bacon. How about a gigantic hearty salad. Tacos?

One other comment I forgot to mention previously.. Now that I'm not eating out nearly as much as I used to, I've found that the restaurant food is not nearly as good as I remember. The food is very mediocre compared to what we make at home -- and I don't have to deal with inconsiderate wait staff who expect 20%+. Extra bonus.

[LennyOnPs3]

i love lasagna...does that come frozen? lol

im serious about not knowing how to cook. my wife is better at that. last time i tried to make mac&cheese i ended up burning it..lol. not sure how i did it but i did. another thing is time. we dont have too much time to prepare food so i guess thats why fast food is such an easy choice. 5 mins and you have your meal.

what i guess im trying to get at is getting ideas from people on what they eat that can be prepared with little effort and little experience. (main reason why im going for frozen stuff 1st lol)

thanks for your comments and keep them coming hhehe

[maat55]

You and your wife can eat 4 breakfast's on just one can of grands biscuts and one roll of jimmy deans sausage cut into eight patties. Flatten the patties as big as you can. It make's eight big sausage biscuts and drink some grape juice with it. Eat only one each per breakfast. Split dinners when you go out and drink water also.

[poundwise]

Book recommendation

[LennyOnPs3]

wow, thanks poundwise. looks like a really good book. probably a good investment for the wife and i lol rather pay $10 for the book than another $250 in fast food

[76Chick]

We do the same thing - eat out a ton on the weekends we get paid... but - I have a family of 5. Super Duper expensive. =(

Great advise above - I wish you the best.

[LennyOnPs3]

Originally Posted by 76Chick

We do the same thing - eat out a ton on the weekends we get paid... but - I have a family of 5. Super Duper expensive. =(

Great advise above - I wish you the best.

heck i'd love to just do it on the weekends lol. we do it every single day. everyday eat fast food EVERYDAY sometimes TWICE a day!! gets very VERY expensive.

[JanH]

I believe the recipe section of the forums has some quick and easy recipes made from scratch. There are many people who work or have busy schedules that need a fast and tasty dinner. I've printed off several of them to try.

[LennyOnPs3]

i had no idea there was a recipe section in this forum. thanks for that info.

[cptacek]

You might ask an elderly neighbor for help. Maybe someone who is home by themselves most of the time, or doesn't get around very good, or doesn't have many people visit. They could come over and teach you guys how to cook some simple things, they would get company, you would provide them with a meal and you would actually spend less feeding 3 instead of 2.

I feel your pain. In my mind, I don't know how to cook. I actually make some pretty good things, but I don't think of myself as a good cook. It is hard to get over that stigma, or road block, or whatever. And I also have a hard time not eating out...it just seems easier to buy the fast food; but then you go to sit down restaurants and you blow your whole budget. I sympathize.

[disneysteve]

I think you need to mentally get past, "i DO NOT know how to cook". It doesn't take a PhD to slice up some veggies, saute them in a pan with a little oil and serve them over some rice or pasta. And it certainly doesn't take any advanced training to pop a frozen dinner in the microwave and hit start. If you watch for sales and coupons, even buying ready-made stuff at the supermarket would be an improvement over doing the fast food thing regularly. Around here, frozen dinners are often on sale for $1.99. So for $4.00 you'd have dinner for 2.

I'm curious. Do you watch cooking shows on TV like on PBS or the Food Network? If so, STOP doing it. Those shows are great. We love them and we've gotten some great ideas from them. But if you are starting basically from scratch in the cooking department, those shows can really scare you off and make you think cooking is this terribly complex process. It doesn't need to be.

Check out the library or bookstore for beginner cookbooks. There are some focused on teaching kids to cook and books geared to college students leaving home for the first time. Those would be good places to start.

The time argument is a cop-out in my opinion. If you count the time to drive to the fast food place, order your food and drive home. You could have prepared a cheap, healthy meal instead. Make omelettes. Make quesadillas. Make tacos. Make soup. I could give you at least a dozen recipes that are ready in under 30 minutes (and I'm not half as cute as Racheal Ray). And remember, if you make extra, you can take some for lunch another day.

There are a bunch of websites devoted to once-a-month cooking where people talk about spending one day each month cooking up big batches of stuff that they portion off and freeze to serve throughout the month. That gets past a lot of the time constraints we all face. We do some of that. For example, my wife makes her own spaghetti sauce. It takes about an hour or so but I'll then portion it off in single-use containers and freeze them, so she only has to make sauce every 2 months or so. Or she'll make a lasagna and we'll do the same thing. Or I'll make a pot of soup and do the same thing. Then I'll just grab a container of soup and take it to the office to heat up for lunch with a fresh roll.

It really isn't that difficult once you put your mind to it.

[lgslgs]

Buy a copy of Taste of Home magazine or Everyday food magazine. You can also spend some time on their websites. Plenty of easy stuff for beginners there.

Recipes & Home Cooking Tips | Taste of Home Magazine

Everyday Food



Lynda

[JBL]

Check out local thrift stores for cookbooks. There are usually several at the goodwills around me. Cookbooks, especially ones designed for the beginner, are very helpful. Cooking is basically just a small number of easy to learn skills. Learn about 5 skills and you can cook most anything you want. Like Disney Steve pointed out, you can cook once and portion off and freeze to save time later.

[FrugalFish]

I was going to suggest trying Simple & Delicious (they changed the name not too long ago and I think that's what it's called now)- it's a sister publication of Taste of Home that Lynda mentioned above. The recipes in there are generally very quick and simple to prepare.

IMO, one of the biggest mistakes that people who don't cook much make is thinking that every dinner has to be a grand affair- meat, starch, vegetable, bread and butter on the side, dessert... That tends to seem overwhelming and put people off. Meals can be very simple- it isn't uncommon for us to have something very simple like a bowl of homemade soup and a slice of bread. Leftovers are also a pretty big starting point for additional meals here. Tonight we're having a roast with mashed potatoes and some frozen veggies; it will make several days worth of food and some leftovers may go into the freezer for use in something later. I think it's hard to save money on food if you won't eat leftovers. My brother won't eat leftovers- I wonder how much food they throw away...

[fruitbowlk]

There are cookbooks out there that has very easy meals to make. if you can read you can cook a nice cheap meal out of these cookbooks. Hamburger help, tuner helper, chicken helper all cheap and easy to make. crock pots help a lot of people also. All you do is throw in some chicken breast, broccoli, cheese soup and you have a meal. Cook on low all or half the day and it done.

[momof1in150]

Kraft Foods - Great Recipes and Food Ideas has a lot of quick and easy recipes. Great for a newbie home cook.

[Caoineag]

I personally am a big fan of allrecipes.com simply because I can do ingredient searches or browse through recipe collections. But for a beginning cook its handy because people review the recipes and give you suggestions on how to do the recipe if its not clear enough.

Believe me, some recipes are flawed to begin with and that doesn't help beginner cooks at all.

If its any consolation my husband couldn't cook mac and cheese either and now we cook alot of things from scratch.