30 Days of Home Cookin'

The past few months have seen me grow extraordinarily lazy. Part of it is just winter, and part of it is, I think, an economy-induced case of the blahs. Whatever the reason, I've been putting very little thought into my food lately. Oh, I've still been enjoying it, but only to the extent that I go somewhere else to eat it (or pick it up and bring it home). I've hardly been cooking at all.

Toward the end of February, I had an idea. I posted the following on LiveJournal (and Facebook):

Neil and I are trying an experiment in which we will not go out to eat during the entire month of March. Occasionally we add up the amount of money we spend dining out and it's always a totally ridiculous number. I know the local restaurant community is hurting right now, but we really want to try this and see how much money we save in a month.

If anyone else out there in LJ Land feels that they are also burning through way too much money going out to eat, feel free to join us!

Local friends, we need your help. Yes, we want to see you, but no, we cannot go out to eat with you. Expect to be invited over for dinner in the coming month. Or invite us over for dinner. Or, when the weather gets better, lets go on a picnic.

I'm actually really excited about this. I've been so lazy about cooking lately. It feels pleasantly challenging knowing that I have to plan meals, grocery shop, and cook. Of course not every meal is going to be some big production, especially not the nights I work late, and I imagine there will be a frozen pizza in the mix at least once. But I'm excited that this will force me to get back in the cooking habit. I know we're going to save a ton of money, and I wouldn't be surprised if we lost weight too.

This is going to be quite a challenge, because we go out to eat all the time. And I also have mixed feelings about a month of not supporting Louisville's wonderful local restaurants, since so many of them are hurting right now. But I think I can justify this to myself by thinking about how over the last several months, we've spent way more than our fair share dining out. It's only 30 days. And come April, we're going to go have a really nice dinner somewhere (and resume restaurant dining in general, though hopefully a bit scaled back).

Blog Tartare hasn't been getting much love from me lately, and I thought this would be a fun project to blog about. I'm sure I won't get to it every day, but hopefully I can keep a pretty good record of what we've been eating instead of eating out constantly. For a baseline, let me share this with you. Last month, according to the checking account (so there's a few days' margin of error), we ate at:

La Rosita
Sol Azteca
Cafe LouLou
Red Robin
Sitar
KenTex
New Albanian
Shapiro's
Hing Wang (I've never heard of this; must be something of Neil's)
Panera
Moe's
Double Dragon
Lunch Today
City Cafe
Cracker Barrel
Vietnam Kitchen
Lynn's Paradise Cafe
Big Boy
Papa John's
McDonald's
Pizza Hut
Dairy Queen
Qdoba
Osaka
Applebee's (I will own the other crappy chains on this list, but not this one; my coworkers forced me to go there.)

Wow. Having typed all that out, I'm rather embarrassed. When did we become incapable of buying raw food and preparing it ourselves?! Do you see now why we need this project??

Here's how it's gone so far:

March 1
Breakfast: Scrambled eggs with cheese and bits of leftover fake peperoni, toast, grapefruit.
Lunch: We skipped it, but had some cottage cheese and apple sauce as a snack.
Dinner: Cooked for my parents and Neil's mom and step-dad. A somewhat bland blue cheese fettuccine, Caesar salad, bread with olive oil. (My mom brought a delicious cake for dessert.)

March 2
Breakfast: Cottage cheese and apple sauce for me, yogurt and granola for Neil.
Lunch: Oh crap! I forgot to bring lunch. I went to Kroger and got soup from their soup bar, which is perilously close to going out to eat. But I got the 16 oz cup so I'd have two days' worth. I think Neil had a fake turkey sandwich.
Dinner: Quorn Cranberry & Goat Cheese Chik'n Cutlet, half a baked potato each (we only had one potato in the house), salad, leftover cake.

March 3
Breakfast: Same as the day before.
Lunch: For me, leftover soup and salad I brought from home. I know Neil also took salad but I don't know what else he had.
Dinner: Plans to cook a real meal were foiled by the fact that I got a ticket Saturday night for driving around with tags that expired in October. After working an hour and a half late, I had to go to the county clerk and deal with that. Then Neil had band practice at 8:00. So we squeezed in some soup (Pacific Natural Foods Cashew Carrot Ginger) and grilled cheese.

And that brings us to right now, when I just had some more leftover cake and another cup of tea.

What's really making this whole thing interesting is that while I've made a grocery list, I haven't actually been shopping yet. And as I'm sure you can imagine from the above list of restaurants, we don't keep a lot of food in the house (when would we eat it?). I hate grocery shopping and I have decided to put it off until tomorrow night (unless Neil comes home from practice and somehow motivates me to go now, even though I'm already in my PJs), so I will have to come up with something for lunch tomorrow based on our limited supply of consumables. I'm thinking tuna sandwiches. I'm sure my co-workers will love me tomorrow.