We all know the great reasons to eat at home rather than eating out or ordering in:
- It saves money
- It’s generally healthier, because you can control your ingredients and choose healthier foods
- And you can wear sweatpants for a greater percentage of the evening.
You might think this also means that you have to cook a complete meal from scratch every single night, thereby spending an hour or more in the kitchen. Every day.
Au contraire, friend. If that’s what it meant, I wouldn’t eat at home half as much as I do. If you’re serious about eating at home most of the time, but also want to maintain your status as a human being, you need to allow for and embrace your natural tendencies.
You know, the tendency to stand in front of the fridge with an empty stomach, needing dinner now. (Hungry family in the background optional.)
The tendency to sit on the couch after a long day and weighing the difficulty of punching a number in your phone versus than stand over the stove.
The tendency to look at the raw ingredients available, and text your husband to pick up pizza on the way home.
The tendency to run out of the one ingredient you need to complete your dinner. The keys are right there…I can be done eating at a restaurant in the time it would take to buy what I need and finish this meal.
If you’re human (and I assume most of you are), that’s bound to happen at least part of the time. We have busy days, we get tired, we forget to stop at the store and our husbands eat the yogurt that was supposed to be saved for the tandoori chicken.
When I started cooking at home, I didn’t take these tendencies into account. When we would inevitably get hungry, it was so easy to make the phone call rather than wait for something to cook. But some tweaks in our system have improved the situation considerably.
Today I present to you three ways I cut down on last-minute eating out:
1. Keep a complete meal in the freezer or pantry
Or ideally, several. Your first line of defense is to have an easy back up plan for when you don’t feel like cooking. Write down on your grocery list, right this minute, something that only requires heating in order to eat. I went to Trader Joe’s last weekend and bought two frozen boxes of palek paneer and a bag of gnocchi and sauce. Not as great as cooking completely from scratch…but still better than spending the money to eat out.
The freezer is your best friend for this step, but if you lack freezer space, you might try ingredients for an easy, delicious sandwich, or just bacon, eggs and toast. If you can pull it out and pop it in the oven, or make and eat it in less than five minutes, it will do the job.
2. Make extra for leftovers
When you go all out and cook a great dinner, make the most of your efforts by making extra and enjoying the leftovers another time. You can read this post to learn why the double batch is a cook’s best friend, but suffice it to say, while you’ve got everything out and you’re already in the kitchen, it’s not that hard to just make extra. Eat the leftovers for lunch later in the week, or freeze them to enjoy after a few weeks–either way, that’s one less meal you’ll have to cook on a night when you’re hungry and tired.
3. Planning ahead just a little will go a long way
As I get better about cooking at home, it has amazed me how much more you can do when you plan ahead. Once you develop a habit of planning meals even a day or two in advance, you release so much stress around meal times. If you’ve planned your meals for the week, you’ll know to take the chicken out to thaw on Tuesday morning, Wednesday is slow cooker day and Thursday’s dinner is an easy one, but you need to start it early so it has time to cook for an hour before dinner.
4. Acknowledge progress, not imperfections
Life doesn’t shake out the way you think it will. Give yourself a pat on the back when you pull a pizza out of the freezer–even if it’s not the healthiest dinner, it’s still better than an all-meat combo delivered in a box. Ditch the ideal, picture-perfect fantasy in your mind and focus on small, realistic improvements you can make instead.
How about you–any tips for cooking at home when you really want to order in? Leave a note in the comments!
