Me and Zach used to spend a metric shit ton of money on dining out every month (yes, I do believe that’s the correct term). We desperately needed to stop flushing $800 per month down the toilet (literally). So, I did a flurry of Google searches and learned that you need to cook most of your meals at home.
There was a problem, though. I Hated—with a capital H—cooking. I had a lot of beef with it (har har):
- What should I cook?
- How do you cook different things?
- I’m usually too tired at the end of the day to cook for hours.
- I never had the ingredients I needed for a given recipe.
- Getting a flu shot is more fun than doing dishes.
Do any of these sound familiar to you? They’re pretty formidable obstacles for me, too. But, once I identified these challenges, I was able to search out strategies and techniques to fix them.
I found out that most of my problems centered on three distinct areas surrounding cooking:
- finding something to cook
- planning to cook it
- the actual cooking process itself
Today, I’ll walk you through how I addressed the first challenge—finding something to cook.
Related Post: How To Battle A Dining Out Addiction…And Win!
Find Recipes To Add To Your Recipe Bank
You can’t cook food if you don’t know what to make. To find things to make, you need to have a recipe. Now that I’m cooking more, I’ve always got my eye out for great recipes. I’ve gotten some good ones from friends, family, and even grocery store mailers.
One of my favorite places to look is Pinterest. I get tons of great ideas just by browsing around people’s boards. There’s a whole industry of food bloggers who post recipes on Pinterest. Some of my favorite bloggers to check out are Damn Delicious, 5 Dollar Dinners, Pinch of Yum, Oh Sweet Basil, and The Wanderlust Kitchen.
Make sure to check out Budget Bytes too—they’re exclusively devoted to cheap but super delicious recipes!
Ah, food porn!
Another of my secret weapons is Craftsy, an online learning platform that has very in-depth series of cooking classes on particular topics. These are great for me as a newbie because they don’t just give you recipes, they teach you how to do an entire cooking style from start to finish using the recipes as examples.
I learned how to make homemade artisan bread and stir-fries using Craftsy classes, and it’s completely opened up new cooking avenues for me to try. I’m still not great at stir-fries mostly because hot oil scares me. Seriously, I don’t know how I still have eyebrows.
Even though I’m not a top-rated chef, I can still make stuff that’s better than the mush I was attempting before. Craftsy runs promotions and sales all the time, and I’m waiting for the next one to buy the Homemade Italian Pasta and the Homemade Sourdough: From Starter To Baked Loaf classes. Yum!
Collect Recipes In Your Recipe Bank
What good is it if you find recipes but don’t remember you have them? Seriously, guys, I ain’t your Nana who can whip up four-course meals in her sleep!
I needed some way to collect all the recipe names in one place so that I could easily search them when planning out meals. I do this in Excel, because spreadsheets make me happy, even if it’s a single column:
OK, I’ll be honest guys. When I first started this the only meals I had entered were “tacos,” “spaghetti,” and “rotisserie chicken.” I’ve come a long way!
I also like to collect my recipes into one master Evernote notebook. Many of the food bloggers post photos of the whole cooking process and I find this insanely helpful. I get most of my recipes online now anyways, and I like to see the pictures when I’m cooking so I can see how bad I messed mine up.
Portobello burgers…yum!
I do have some recipes clipped from magazines and on index cards, and I’ve been meaning to scan these into Evernote, but so far I haven’t found the time. For those, I have a small index card box.
Related: NSFW Recipe Index Cards
I’ve found that curating an ever-expanding list of recipes has been one of the most fun part of the whole cooking process. It’s like a choose-your-own adventure book, but with a tasty meal at the end rather than a wad of gum.
Don’t Be Lazy—Start Collecting Recipes Today!
Guys, seriously. If you don’t have a recipe bank, WTF. It’s not hard to create one. It’ll only take a few minutes of your time to get started. After that, just spend a few minutes once a month or so looking for recipes. If you find recipes elsewhere, then great! Snag ’em like a tall, dark, handsome prince.
Now go forth and start a recipe bank!
- Create A Recipe Bank <- You are here!
- Create A Meal Plan, Dammit!
- Make Cooking Easier
Do you know of any great frugal recipe sources? Leave a comment below!
I desperately need to set up a recipe bank. I often try recipes I like and then forget how to make them after a while and then have to start looking for recipes all over again. If I had a core ten recipes that were go-to meals that would definitely make my cooking a lot easier. Great post!
Thanks! I used to be the same way. You don’t know how many times I’ve had to look up my go-to pulled pork recipe.
Care to share that recipe? 🙂
You bet; it’s this one: http://www.porkbeinspired.com/recipes/perfect-pulled-pork/ The trick is to always use pork butt or shoulder – never pork loin or anything else. We did that a couple weeks ago and it turned into a dried-out brick. The pork butt has a lot of fat in it that gives it a melt-in-your-mouth texture. And, it’s always on sale here and it usually makes about 12 servings total for us. We usually just plop some barbecue sauce on it and make pulled pork sandwiches, but that was getting old. So, I also found this great pulled pork recipe: http://www.debtfreeafterthree.com/frugal-recipe-pork-tacos-with-mango-pico-de-gallo/ I made the pulled pork the same as in the first recipe but made them up into tacos with the mango salsa. Super cheap, and it tasted amazing!
Food Network magazine has these inserts each month of 50 recipes for whatever (quick breads, pasta dishes, smoothies). They’re pretty great, because with very minor changes to a base recipe, you can get a lot of variety. I’ve had a lot of success finding recipes with the Yummly app too.
I just checked out the Yummly app. It’s amazing! Thanks for the great recommendation – I’ll be using this one for sure.
Another good resource is SuperCook.com. It lets you enter which ingredients you have on hand and comes up with recipes that match.
Thanks Gary, this would be a great one for when items I don’t eat often go on sale. I don’t eat much asparagus, for example, but when it goes on sale I never have a good recipe for it. This looks like a great resource for that!
Call me old fashioned, but I actually have a pocket folder for recipes. I get most of my recipes from the internet, but I only print and add them to the prestigious folder if they are absolutely amazing. I feel like keeping them in a folder in my kitchen allows for quicker access and it’s easier for me to read than scrolling through ad filled recipe pages on my phone.
Good point – paper recipes definitely do have their advantages (like not splashing food across your computer screen).
This is me exactly…all aspects of cooking from planning to cleaning up-it was like you were talking about ME-haha. I really have been working on being better because I want to eat healthier and save money on eating out. I like the idea of using Evernote because of its search capabilities.
Ha! I knew I wasn’t the only one! 🙂 It’s still a work in progress but I’m getting better. And it is fun sometimes when I can make food better than what I’d get in a restaurant. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I feel like a rock star!
Ugh. I feel you. I’m terrible at meal planning because I stink at cooking and have no idea what to do. But collecting recipes on Pinterest is a lot of fun.
Haha, I know! I like pinning things even if I know I’ll never make them. Chocolate raspberry souffle? Sure! Um..how do eggs work again? lol!
I don’t really like cooking either! I also have a few picky eaters in this house. Because of them, I tend to make the same 10-15 meals over and over again.
I used to be the same way too – I grew up in a household where it was either hot dogs, spaghetti, or burgers every night it seemed. Since marrying a more cultured man, though, I’ve expanded my horizons a bit. It’s fun to watch my parent’s faces if I take them out to sushi when they come to visit now. 🙂
So there is hope for me yet? lol! I make a few decent things, but I just end up eating the same things over and over because I need stuff that is health AND does not take a lot of time to make. In the summer I tend to stick to big salads at dinner with some small amount of protein. Boring, but does the job.
If I could live off of salad alone that would be amazing! With the occasional steak thrown in, of course. 🙂 Reduce the decision fatigue. But then again, I guess a variety of sources of nutrition is best….damn science…
These are some really good tips, and I definitely do not enjoy cooking haha. I’ve noticed when I plan it out I am more likely to succeed, but even then sometimes things don’t turn out as planned. I’m just not a good cook and don’t enjoy it, but I will cook from time to time to give my wife a break.
For all the plans that I make, it seems every week something gets thrown out of whack. I usually have a few meals in the freezer that I can thaw out real quick for just such occurrences, though, and that seems to help a lot.