Teaching Your Family to Eat at Home More
For every family there are nights when the kids have after-school activities, or you have a late meeting, for us many soccer games, only to get home late, with an empty fridge, and hungry stomachs that are screaming for food.
Are you prepared or do you eat out?
With some easy planning, and very little cooking times, thank goodness we don’t have to run to a restaurant to eat out every night. Can you imagine the food bill for the month? I don’t know how families do it. And for us, in this stage of life, we save most the eating out for “date nights” for my husband and me. The kids do well making their own dinners anyway, and they like to be creative in the kitchen.
It’s true, as the times we’ve asked our kids to come, they say they’d rather make a nutritious meal at home! I never thought I’d hear those words, so I guess our hard work of “controlling” what goes into each dish, and our teens listening, has paid off.
How to Avoid Eating Out:
1. In the morning, or even the prior weekend, think ahead to what dinner will be and either use the slow cooker, or take meat (or food items) out of the freezer.
2. Prep in advance. Choose a day where you can cook extra foods, or get meals ready for the week.
3. Make extra when you cook; try to get 2-3 meals out of one larger recipe. IE, cook two whole chickens, eat one for dinner, use the other and leftovers for chicken soup with pasta and enchiladas (adding rice and beans).
4. Take advantage of your freezer. Learn which foods freeze well and which don’t.
5. Always keep your pantry stocked. Keep a list in the pantry of food items/dishes to cook using pantry items. Show your kids!
When you save money, and you eat healthy (knowing what you’re putting in), it feels good to be good stewards of our finances and bodies, doesn’t it?
And now that my kids are all teens, one almost 20, I can give myself a little pat on the shoulder (good Mom!) knowing I’ve taught my kids well.
Not perfectly, but well.
What’s your struggle with eating out, or are you disciplined when it comes to home-cooked meals?
Hello and welcome to my home and table!
I’m Sandy—lover of food, family, cooking, THE BIG BOARD, travel, and bringing people together. Through great recipes and connection around the table, we become better, stronger, and more courageous people. Feasting on Life is real, and every time we do it, we grow a little more. Read more...
We used to eat out alot but no longer do so. Partly because I was working on losing weight, partly because I didn’t want to spend the money for lousy food when it’d cost me less than half to make something tasty at home, and partly because of watching an excessive amount of “restaurant makeover” shows on TV. Every restaurant kitchen they show is filty with mice all over the place! It has completely turned me off to eating out.
I bought a few issues of Cooking Light magazine and made alot of recipes from them. I decided that even if the kids didn’t eat completely healthy every night, we’d do “restaurant night” at least one night a week. The plan was to spend money on the best and freshest ingredients and to try something we’d never had before. We’ve been doing it for almost 2 months now and my kids love it!
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We have a yo-yo method with this one. Planning is the key. When we don’t have a plan our methods fall apart. Recently we have started “making extras”. We find that each time we make a meal there is just a little bit extra. Every other meal we will freeze the extras. This way we don’t have a weeks worth of leftovers that tend to bore us.
Then when the groceries are getting a little low we reach into the freezer and pull out something. Now this method tends to leave us with a dinner table with a buffet style menu. There is a little of this and a little of that, added to the veggies in the fridge. Sometimes the flavors go together…sometimes not so much. The kids like it because if there is a little left over of something they really didn’t care for…the parents eat it.
On busy days we also try to pack a picnic…the cooler is a life saver. Sometimes it won’t fill our stomach, but it gets us past the drive thru and back home before tempers fall apart.