Meal Time

There is a commercial out now from a major fast food chain that is trying to convince people that you can’t make a fried chicken dinner for less than $10.00. That just gets my goat! More and more I hear people say that they can eat out cheaper than they can cook at home. And when they cook at home they have all these leftovers that they don’t like to eat. Or they are just so busy that they don’t cook at home anymore.

I guess I live in a totally different world. I can buy a whole chicken for around $4.00 (not on sale), the amount of flour, spices, and oil I use to fry it in may amount to $1.00, and I can make 2 full pots of side dishes and rolls for less than $3.00. That puts me at $8.00 and from that I get 8 pieces of chicken, not 7. And the leftovers will be served as lunches for DH & I to take to work.

As far as being too busy, it takes very little time to plan a menu for the whole week and that is half the battle. A planned menu makes things so much easier. You know what is for dinner every night. It takes me about 25 to 30 minutes per week to plan a menu. Then every night after dinner I do what I can for the next nights dinner (take the meat out of the freezer, peel potatoes, whatever I can) to make it go faster. A lot of our meals are done in the crock pot and you can usually go ahead and put everything in the crock pot, set it in the fridge, when you get up in the morning put it on the base and turn it on. A lot of the other meals I prepare can be done in an hour. We both work away from home and are gone 10.5 hours a day so things have to be fast. Most restaurants would take at least an hour.

I make extra some nights just so we have leftovers for lunch the next day. I use to eat out almost every day at lunch and I can tell you that eating leftovers for lunch has saved me almost $30.00 a week. Even if I go out and buy the expensive sandwich meats from the deli and spend $7.99 a pound (which I would never do) I can make at least 6 sandwiches from that. That’s a lot cheaper than a $5.00 foot long.

Then there is the issue of the family time that all of these people are missing out on. This is a special time when your children are still at home when they can tell you about their day, and you can have a conversation with them, that will pass too quickly. Before you know it, they will be out on their own and you will miss the time that you could have had with them, but were too busy.

Don’t let consumerism convince you that it’s cheaper to eat at a fast food restaurant than at home. You also don’t usually get sick from eating food that you prepare. And you know how cleanly it was prepared and what quality of ingredients you used. These things are always questionable to me.

I encourage you to eat at home.

Mae