If you’re like most of us, you find yourself heading out to eat more often than you really want to. Your afternoons are packed, you’re run down, tired, and just not up to spending an hour in the kitchen! What if I told you that for the amount of time you spend driving to your favorite restaurant, picking up take-out or waiting to be seated, you could be having a home cooked meal, at your dinner table, with your family, and eating FAR less calories, sodium, fat, and sugar … for about the cost of one adult meal purchased at a restaurant.
There are a lot of choices, so you can choose one or all of them to suit your family’s needs.
- Crock Pot Meals – Put all of your ingredients for a pot roast, or bean soup, or chili, or barbeque chicken, or any of the other thousand variations of crock pot cooking, into your pot in the morning before work. Turn it on low. That’s it. When you get home, you’ll have a hot, home cooked meal ready and waiting for you. All for the time it takes to chop a few veggies and tossing them in the pot.
- Grilled meat and/or veggies and a salad – More of a meat and veggies person? Toss some frozen meat into a baggie with marinade and put it in the refrigerator to thaw before you go to bed. By the time 5:00 rolls around the next day, your meat will be thawed, marinated, and ready for 10 minutes on the grill. Wrap fresh veggies such as zucchini or carrots, or sliced potatoes along with some garlic and olive oil in aluminum foil and toss on the grill next to your chicken or pork chops.
- Cook Extra – make double batches of meals on the nights you do cook. Halve the food immediately and put the extra into microwave safe containers and freeze for re-heating on a night when you’re rushed.
- Stop at the grocery store – Kroger, Publix, Costco, and almost every other major grocery store has a deli section with roast chicken, or other hot and ready meat. If you haven’t laid anything out for dinner and you don’t have extra helpings in the freezer, stop in at one of those stores, pick up a roast chicken, bag of salad, and loaf of bread. That’s a full family meal, in under 5 minutes, for less than $10.
Start turning your family’s financial ship around by cutting 50% or more off your grocery expenses, household cleaners, toiletries, dining out, and more. I use this system and save 60% to 75% off retail prices every single week.
