Help me eat out less!

Northern_Inuit_Luv

Okay, I am really sick of my diet, its horrible. We moved into our house about 7 months ago, and it seems we can't go a whole week without eating out...and not eating out healthy...like going to culvers.

Our biggest problem is that I'm not the Cook. My husband has always done all the cooking, and now he's working 10-12 hour days. He says that he wants to cook ___ for dinner, then gets home and is too tired to cook so we order take out or go for some fast food. I am taking control because this is getting ridiculous. We are both putting on weight and I feel incredibly tired all the time. If he doesn't like what I make, oh well.

So I need some help, because (like I said) I am not the cook. I don't know how to be creative and I'm really picky. However, I follow directions well. So even if you have something that I can find in the Joy cookbook or online, please suggest it.

Here is what I can cook:
Stuffed Peppers
Chicken Quesadillas
Santa Fe Casserole (layers of chips, meat/sour cream/diced chilli, and cheese/green onions/tomatoes)
I'm a wiz at hamburger helper
Pasta
Roasted Veggies
(and not so practical) Roasted Duck

Hopeless, I know.

Here is what my husband or I will not eat:
Fish
Mushrooms (I can have them if they are tiny and not noticeable...but they turn my stomach with just a thought)
Don't really care for peas
Spicy stuff


And I'm afraid to cook on the grill (don't ask...just a weird phobia...not that this is the season for grilling)


Please help me think of things to cook for dinner.

hulkamaniac

Do what I did when I moved out. I had no cooking skills whatsoever. I cooked the easy stuff (like hamburger helper) pretty much every day and then on the weekend when I had extra time I made it a point to cook something new. Every week, I would try something new. I went to a site like allrecipes.com (omgz teh advertizing111), picked something interesting, bought the ingredients and cooked it.

ioreks_mom

i know all about eating out my husband and i are really good at being too tired to cook. but, i have come to realize that you can cook a fast meal that is good for you in the amount of time it takes to order food for take out. also, something that really helped us was to move to a new town that doesn't have take out! haha! i know that is not an option for everyone. well, it is not that we don't have any take out, there are 5 restaurants here and one really is fast food. :S haha! we don't eat fast food anymore since we have been away from it for about 3 months now, it makes us sick now.

one of my all time favourite fast comfort foods is mac and cheese with broccoli and cauliflower. i make cheese sauce - i don't have a recipe...i kind of wing it! but basically you melt marg or butter in a sauce pot and add some flour to make a paste. then add milk until it is a nice consistency - this is where i have the problem usually, i usually end up making cheese paste then add grated cheese, whatever kind you like but my favourite is old cheddar and parm. and stir until it is melted and nice and smooth. while that is doing you can put the pasta on to boil. when the pasta is nearly done add broccoli and cauliflower florets to boil just for a little bit, it is nice for them to be a little crunchy still. then we drain the pasta/veggies and pour the cheese sauce on top and serve. we don't bother to put it in the oven - it saves time this way. it is super yummy and great on cold nights, or any night really when comfort food is called for.

that is my quick, easy recipe. good luck. believe me, i know where you are coming from!

oh, another one we really do a lot is nachos.

i also like to browse recipes online and find something that looks good and just try it. we have gotten a lot of favourites that way.

Karinia

I second allrecipes.com. That website is my recipe bible, lol.

Spaghetti is easy to make. Just boil some noodles, brown some meat and throw tomato sauce/paste in.

I used to make this really good baked chicken all the time. I found the recipe at that website..
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Famous-...en/Detail.aspx
It's the best.

If you do go to the allrecipes.com website make sure to read the reviews.

FilleBelle

I am not a cook. I don't enjoy cooking and I'm not creative about it. But, like you, I can follow directions well. The key for people like us is to invest in some decent cookbooks.

Cookbooks for college students are going to be a great choice because they are going to be easy, quick, healthy, and probably not terribly adventurous. The same can probably be said for cookbooks for newlyweds and bachelors. I am a female and a vegetarian and I nevertheless enjoy the A Man, a Can, a Plan series. I also like the Weight Watchers series, even though I don't do WW.

I like to cook something large on Sunday that I can then refrigerate and use all week. Weight Watchers' zero point vegetable soup is great, as is a big pot of vegetarian chili or spaghetti. If you bake or grill several chicken breasts over the weekend, you can refrigerate them and use them for different things during the week...cut up one and put it in pasta, eat one with some sort of sauce, mix one with rice and sauteed veggies. The crock pot it also my friend...put the meal together Sunday night, turn the crock pot on Monday morning and I have dinner when I walk in the door from work on Monday afternoon. I use a vegetarian crock pot cookbook, of course, but the crockpot is great for meats.

It's also important to stock up on some basics that are easy to throw together. Invest in some cheese and some cold cuts so that you can put together sandwiches. Buy several potatoes and whatever you like to top them with (salsa? sour cream? grated cheese? onions? bacon bits?) so that you can just microwave a couple. Pile on the toppings and call it a meal!

I am NOT a militant vegetarian who constantly tries to convert people to her diet choice, but I do sometimes encourage lazy cooks to consider meat alternatives because they allow you to eat your favorite easy foods in a healthier fashion. I seriously can't taste the difference between real hot dogs and veggie dogs, but veggie dogs are WAY lower in fat and sodium and they're super easy. Same with the vegetarian ground beef substitute. On it's own, it doesn't taste like anything, but it has a convincing ground beef texture, so if you add a store bought sauce or flavor to it, you can enjoy a significantly healthier version of tacos or Sloppy Joes, both of which are easy to make.

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hulkamaniac

I'm in love with anything I can bake. I like tossing crap in a pan, cooking it for 30-40 minutes while I mess around w/the animals and then eating it. I eat a lot of leftovers though and I make a mean chicken meat loaf.

sassykzt

Check out Mark Bittman's "How To Cook Everything" -- the 2008 edition. Good, simple, healthy recipes. Also check out the "Best Recipe Series" ( Meat chicken, skillet recipes, soup ,etc...) from Cook's Illustrated. These are fool proof recipes that have been tested by the staff who are very knowledgeable in food science-- I have yet to try a "bad" recipe! I borrowed all of these from the library. I always borrow a cookbook before I buy.

Marsh Muppet

Learn to cook. It's easy. Everybody should be able to put a decent meal together.

Get some cookbooks and follow the instructions. Once you do it for a while, you start to learn about food compatibility and different methods of cooking. It's like anything else. If you are not a "natural" cook, you have to develop a knowledge base to work from. You'll ruin quite a few meals before you get good at it, but there's no way around that.

hulkamaniac

I would suggest both a good fire extinguisher and developing a taste for burnt food. Both will prove handy.

Marsh Muppet

I was the chief cook in a couple of decent restaurants. What I know is that learning to cook is the easy part. Learning how to salvage your disasters is the real challenge.

If people knew what goes on in restaurant kitchens, they'd eat in a whole lot more.

foxthegoldfish

I have the same problem, we eat WAY too much fast food

But I love to cook, I just get to that time of day and cant be bothered or can't come up with anything to cook

I would say making a list of things you can cook in under 20min (well 20min of actually doing anything) and any time you want to have fast food make something from the list instead.

my best ones are;
Gunk: boil water, throw in pasta, add chunky mixed veg (the frozen ones, the bigger the better and have a variety on hand), once they are cooked add a can of pasta sauce heat and add cheese. we even eat it from the pot its also really good as you can put any meat in, as long as you cook it first, there are lots of kinds of pasta sauce you can buy, and mixed veg come in lots of varieties. easy and not too bad for you.


or we have cheese toasties, cheese, any filling of your choice bread and grilled till hot.

or a simple stir fry, mixed veg and meat plus a packet of sauce. just another version of gunk really.

I totally know how hard it is to cook when fast food is easier

Willowy

Mmmm.....Culver's. It is fortunate for me that the nearest Culver's is half an hour away, or I'd gain a lot of weight! I try not to eat much meat, but a Butterburger is just irresistable.

There are some online guides that can really help. I think one is Saving Dinner. You can buy their weekly planners, and it gives you a shopping list and the recipes, and you can make them ahead and freeze them. My mom subscribes to a few different planning services, but I think that one is the best. They have different plans for vegetarians and other special needs.

I also keep a lot of Weight Watchers, Lean Cuisine, and Healthy Choice frozen dinners around. Cheaper than fast food and they aren't half bad. I try to get the ones with lots of veggies.

RBark

I tend to cook like 10 pieces of chicken at once and when i don't feel like cooking a meal, just reheating the chicken and having a sandwich, or just cooking rice (easy with rice cooker) etc.

trumpetjock

As a veteran of the restaurant world, I can definitely confirm this. You don't want to know some of the things we've done to save dishes.

Northern_Inuit_Luv

yikes! don't think I want to know those stories...

But thanks for the suggestions everyone.

My goal tomorrow is to try to get a 3-4 week "plan" going. See if I can find different things to add to the diet that are easy and something that I will actually eat. My mom is helping by passing on some things that she knows that I like And I've been flipping through some of my cook books and finding things online and emailing them to myself.

lovemygreys

A couple months ago I got on a mission to eat at home more too. DH has usually been the "every day" chef in the house and I just had a few specialties I did a couple times a month.

I printed out a calendar week at a time and just planned out dinners - I have a few "staples" that I rotate through, like taco night. I do taco night once every two weeks or so...same thing with the other staples. When I do things like Spaghetti, I cook a double batch and freeze half of it for a future dinner...Same with chili or other meals that can freeze and defrost w/o losing too much in quality. I am lucky that my mom sent me off into the world with a really great book of her basic recipes so I have several meals that I know we already like.

By writing out the meal plans, after a few weeks I had some ready made menus to pull from so it gets easier every week to decide what to make. During the week I try to keep it fairly easy...last night was barbeque pork chops, Uncle Ben's 90 second microwave rice and steam fresh broccoli. The Steamfresh frozen veggies come out really, really well and are super easy and fast if you like veggies.

Tonight is pot roast in the slow cooker - virtually impossible to mess up and takes, like, 10 minutes to get it together.

hulkamaniac

That cracks me up because the last time I made a roast in a crock pot, I totally ruined it. I set the heat on high for 8-9 hours instead of low. I ended up with something that looked and tasted strangely like charcoal. Both Brutus and Zero asked that I burn meat more often.

Northern_Inuit_Luv

I'm trying this today, but my husband just phoned and said he was coming home late...so its ready in 10 minutes and he's not going to be here for another 40 minutes not a good start to my home cooking...at least I didn't start the mashed potatoes yet...so they will be nice and fresh.

lovemygreys

Oh no! LOL OK, well I guess you found one of the only ways to mess up crock pot pot roast

FaithFurMom09

2 things: Crockpot and Cast Iron= BFF

You can quite literally stick anything the crockpot and walk away. It does all the cooking for you. Whole chickens, soups, cakes (yes you can even cook a cake in a crockpot).
Cast Iron skillet is WONDERFUL! You can fry, cook, heck even back in it! Since its non stick (when seasoned correctly) you can really screw much up by burning it.

I stink at cooking too but when i found the crockpot love, it was all over.

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