Instead of making homemade meals, you’ve decided to go out to eat again. Here’s what happens next:
- You get dressed and spiffied up: 30 minutes.
- You drive to the restaurant and fight traffic (both ways): another 30 minutes.
- Time between entering the restaurant and eating: 30 minutes.
- What you pay for: 10x more than the cost of the ingredients.
Yes, by the time you’re done eating out, you’ve invested a LOT of time and money into a single meal. Why? Because you told yourself it was “more convenient” than cooking homemade meals. Is that really true though?
Time needed to prep and cook this grilled broccoli recipe? 15 minutes.
3 reasons to make homemade meals
Here are three reasons you should be eating more homemade meals:
- Save Time – Instead of spending time getting yourself ready and then driving to and from the restaurant, you could have used way less time doing meal prep.
- Save Money – Instead of spending your entire meal budget to pay for someone else to cook and serve you your food, you could have used a small fraction of that money to get your own local, fresh, organic ingredients.
- Healthier & Customized to Your Needs – Instead of having virtually no control over what ingredients go into your restaurant meal (sugar, refined carbs, etc), you can cater your home-cooked meals to your exact specifications.
To be clear: we’re all for supporting local farmers and locally-owned restaurants who support those farmers. Both types of business are essential to a vibrant, dynamic economy.
A Daily Harvest FarmBox full of fresh, organic goodies from local farms!
However, under most circumstances, going out to eat is the most expensive and inconvenient dining decision you can make!
For the price of this cup of coffee, you could buy a lot of local, organic ingredients to make a homemade breakfast.
Yes, this holds true for breakfast, lunch, and dinner alike. In fact, for the price of a high-priced cup of triple rainbow capu-machu unicorn pumpkin spice-foamed breakfast coffee (that may actually be a real thing at this point), you could buy all the breakfast ingredients you need for a couple days – including homemade coffee.
Can you drive a car? Then you can learn to cook.
Don’t know how to cook? Well, there was a time in your life when you didn’t know how to drive a car either, but you figured that rather difficult task out in order to open up a whole new world of opportunity. The same is true with learning to cook.
Take the time you would have invested driving to a restaurant each day and invest it into watching YouTube “how to cook” videos. You’ll be amazed and proud at how quickly you can become your new, favorite chef.
If you learned how to drive a car, you can learn how to make homemade meals. In fact, you can use the time you would spend driving back and forth to restaurants to watch how to cook videos online!
Last thing: if you have FOMO (that’s Fear Of Missing Out for you old timers) because you think everyone else is going out to eat while you stay home, think again. As this fascinating FoodDive article points out, “the number of consumers preparing and eating food at home increased” each year over the past decade.
So, go homemade for most of your meals! Your wallet, your schedule, and your waistline will all thank you. Need some fresh, local, organic ingredients to help you get started? See below. 🙂
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