Find a Recipe by Ingredients You Have at Home

Tired from working all day at the office and not excited about going home and spending 2 hours cooking? We have all experienced his. And nobody wants to do dishes after working in the kitchen for a couple hours.

Why cook when you can just go pick something up from the fast food joint? It’s a lot easier, however, it’s expensive and unhealthy without a doubt. Our goal is to get us all into the kitchen and stop spending money eating out.

Cooking at is easy and a lot healthier because you control the ingredients. Surprisingly, it’s stress relieving, too.

There is one thing that you have to do in order to get dinner to the table without spending all night dedicated to this and it can be summarized with one word. Planning.

Step 1 – You need to calendar your meals each week. Find a calendar and write out your meals for the week. I try to cook Sunday – Thursday. It’s really important to make enough for lunch the next day. For example, if I’m making dinner on Monday, I try to make enough for the following day. This saves a lot of money! Even though lunches are only $5 per lunch, it adds up quickly.

Step 2 – Make a shopping list of ingredients you need. Many times, when compared to what you already have at home, you’ll find that you don’t really need to purchase a lot of ingredients at the grocery store.

Step 3 – Make a trip to the grocery store. This trip can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour depending on what day and time you go. I try to get to the store early on Sunday mornings in order to beat the rush.

Step 4 – This is the best and most fun step. Cook your meal. Once you have all the ingredients, cooking is easy and a lot of fun. When watching a cooking show on TV you will see how easy it was for them to make the meal once all the ingredients are purchased? With proper planning, this is how it will be for you in the kitchen, each night.

Final step – Make your husband, wife or kids wash all the dishes. You did the hard part of buying the groceries and cooking the meal (even though cooking was the fun part…shhh), it’s time for them to pitch in.

With a little discipline and a lot of planning, you will see your food expense decrease and your waistline will also decrease.