I Don’t Miss Eating Out As Often (An Ode to Eating At Home)

When you’re able to cook at home and make yummier and healthier options, it’s better all around.

Photo by Rc Cf on Unsplash

When you have as many dietary considerations as I do, eating at home feels like an excellent way to accommodate that. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to have a partner who loves to cook for both of us. He always ensures that our portion sizes are reasonable and the food is delicious at all times.

I have a decent knowledge of cooking myself. I find myself spending more time than I’d like to admit watching cooking videos and reading recipes from all over the internet. When I’ve put that into practice every once in a while, I’ve done a decent job of it. I’ve made everything from curries, rice dishes, pasta dishes, to even blueberry cheesecake.

And that’s where the part about not eating out as often comes in. First of all, have you seen how much it costs to eat out these days? Paying $200 every 10 days is rough already for our grocery bill, but imagine if all our meals came from McDonald’s or Taco Bell in a given month, we would go broke.

The other part about that is that the food isn’t even that healthy. Sure, you could opt for “healthier” options, but that’s still way more unhealthy than something you could make for yourself. I will admit that we do still go out sometimes when we’re not feeling up to cooking, but that’s way less than we used to in the past, and our wallets and stomachs feel a lot better for that.

I remember when there was a stretch a few years ago when we’d be eating out more than once a week and both of us would get upset stomachs and even diarrhea (no, I refuse to spell it diarrhoea, Brits, I don’t even know why an o would be there). That wasn’t a pleasant feeling. I would feel and become physically sick, not being able to regulate what went into my food.

At the end of the day, nothing comes close to the pasta sauce we make in our slow cooker. We load the meat into there with fresh vegetables and just enough store-bought sauce combined into it to make that final product taste fantastic. Plus, we can store that for days, and eat it over multiple meals, not just one.

We can also use my penchant for going through recipes and cooking videos to come up with new meal ideas in case we get bored with eating the same thing. You can’t say that if you’re going to the same fast food place all the time. There are only so many different iterations of over-caloried garbage before you get bored.

Anyway, it’s great even with both of us having chronic pain and being unable to do a lot in our daily lives, to at least be able to find a way to get our food prepared and completed with all of the useful cooking apparatuses we have at our disposal. The air fryer and the slow cooker/instant pot are so low-maintenance and so easy to use for people like us.

Do you have any recipe ideas for us? How often do you cook or eat out? What is your go-to meal when you’re craving fast food but eat at home instead?