Day 9: Reevaluating Take Out Favorites

Back when we first got started with menu planning, I asked you to find out what your family’s favorite meals were, including take out meals. Let’s look at some of those Take Out meals today!

Assuming you’re looking to save more money on your food budget and eat healthier in this new year, let’s figure out a way to subsitute homemade for some of these take out favorites, at least some of the time.

Over 11 years ago now, when my husband first started to experience his pay going down, we had to figure out some ways to cut back. One way was to, obviously, cut out eating out altogether.

We enjoyed figuring out how to make some of our former take out favorites at home. Most of these are now standards in our house as homemade.

I think we all agree now that my homemade tacos (especially the chicken soft tacos) are better than any restaurant’s. I make fantastic pizza (made to order in fact). I even learned how to perfect egg rolls and chicken fried rice, and started canning homemade Plum Duck Sauce.We prefer homemade burgers.

Let me let you in on a little secret: it wasn’t an immediate ta-da moment. I had to keep working at the recipes I found to make them to our tastes. As I said earlier, I love to cook so that helped this process along.

Where did I learn how to make them? On the internet (except the plum duck sauce. I came up with that on my own while reading the Kikkomen label).

Did my family readily accept them right away?

Errr….that’s a little more difficult. Mostly. We had some trial and error on my recipes, especially when we switched to baking Egg Rolls instead of deep frying them (there was “weeping and gnashing of teeth” over that one, but oldest daughter and I stood strong in the face of adversity ~smile~).

The key is to translate these changes to your family members in a way that is meaningful to them. In the case of our children, that meant saying things like, “If you want_____, I need to save money somewhere. This is a great place to start. Would you rather have greasy pizza from the place up the road, or tasty homemade pizza AND ______?”

Assignment #9

Looking over a few of your favorite take out meals, are there any you feel you could tackle at home?

Pizza is usually a fairly easy place to start, as are tacos. With homemade pizza, you don’t even have to go completely “from scratch” if you’re not yet ready for that. The canned pizza dough from Pillsbury is actually quite good, and there are frequently coupons for it.

(Now there’s something my perfectionist supermom self of 12 years ago never dreamed of saying)

If you don’t have a recipe available in your cookbooks at home, do a quick google search. I usually search www.foodnetwork.com first, especially because they often have video demonstrations too. This may be helpful to you if you’re not sure of the instructions.

If you’re hooked on a specific brand, search for “Mock (brand) Pizza”. The word “clone” is also often used in recipes that seek to replicate specific brands. You’d be shocked at all of the Starbucks Clone Recipes out there!

Happy Cooking ,