Eating At Home vs. Eating Out (which is EVIL)

August 6, 2009 – Since my birthday I’ve been making a concerted effort to get my financial house (so to speak) in order. I’ve started putting money into saving every month and watching my spending. By and large, I’ve been pretty successful. The one place where I have consistently and predictably fallen short is eating out. In New York it is easier to eat out than it is to buy groceries and eat at home. Here are my theories on why this is:

• No car: You have to carry everything and/or take an unwieldy and completely ugly cart.
• Time: It is hard to find everything at one grocery store (we don’t have a whole bunch of large grocery stores here unless you are lucky enough to live near one of the Whole Foods or Traders Joes, which I don’t), so you end up having a lot of specialty shops. I have a little grocery store near my house that is okay for basics, but you don’t really want to buy meat of any kind there and you have to check the dates on everything or there is a good chance you’ll go home with milk that is so old it’s practically cottage cheese.
• Time Part II: Once you get home, the last thing you want to do is prep and cook a meal, and here since they deliver EVERYTHING it’s even easier to justify ordering in.
• Climate Control: There are certain things you just can’t make in NYC in the summer time if you live in an apartment without central AC. This includes many baked goods, breads and pastas, and more.

However, I eat more healthy foods when I eat at home and I really actually enjoy cooking, so this needs to change. This weekend, I am going to sit down and plan out meals for the next couple of weeks and try and eat at home AND take my lunch to work at least 5 out of 7 days per week. I will chronicle that here so that someone (anyone?) can see how I’m doing with this. I will attempt to update this on Sunday, August 8, 2009 with my menu for next week. I will be taking a brief hiatus from this experiment on August 21 – 25, 2009 when I go visit my dad (also, if anyone knows someone who wants to feed my cat while I’m gone, that would be great!).