Frugal living - Cooking

For the past 3 weeks, every Saturday afternoon we cook a big family dinner. We used to go out to eat at a restaurant every single Saturday and it was really adding up. Over $200 a month! Our weekly restaurant meal was our way of "rewarding" ourselves at the end of a long, hard week.


I love to cook and usually would cook a nice meal on Sundays, which is a common tradition on most homes. Sunday is a real busy day for us. I make my husband's lunches for the entire week that he takes to work with him and I do laundry that piled up from the weekend. My husband is busy ironing all of his dress shirts for work that week. Then I'd cook a big dinner and by the end of the night I am completely exhausted.


So, my husband suggested that we make our nice meals on Saturday instead of Sunday. By doing this, we are saving lots of money by not going out to eat or spending time in the stores or the mall because we're bored.


I do cook all our meals during the week, but Saturday's our chance to do something fun with the cooking. We'll wake up early, catch any yard sales or flea markets in the way to the store (always keeping our eye out for Christmas presents, kid's clothes, etc) and get to the store to pick up our ingredients that we might need for our special dinner.


One Saturday we did Mexican and we made our own salsa. It was so fresh and healthy. My husband cooked the taco meat while I made the salsa. The next week we made German food. Today we made Indian. We stopped at the local indian grocery and got a few of the ingredients we needed (basmati rice, garam masala and naan). It was really good and for less than half of what we'd pay for it at an Indian restaurant we got 6 times the amount of food. The leftovers my husband is taking to work for lunch and now I don't have to cook his lunch tomorrow!