Wielding Economic Power in the Kitchen

Cooking at home is cheaper than eating out.

True or not true?

Well… it’s obvious, right? Cooking at home is almost always cheaper than eating out—unless you’re eating filet mignon every night. And even then… a filet at home is still way cheaper than ordering one in a restaurant.

As inflation hammers our pocketbooks and drains our bank accounts, most of us are looking for ways to save money. Or earn more.

There are really only two ways out of the “not enough money” conundrum: spend less, or earn more.

We don’t eat out all that often. During Covid, we kind of lost the habit. What we did discover were meal-prep services like Fresh Prep. For about $50, we’d get two chef-y meals—often with leftovers—that were genuinely delicious. Fresh flavours, new tastes, and no guesswork with spices (the Big Cooking Mystery!). Even better, once we’d made a recipe once, we could recreate it again without paying another $50.

So when Covid faded and we started eating out again, we were… underwhelmed. The food often wasn’t as good as what we could make at home. And it was a lot more expensive.

We’ve gone out for special occasions—like my birthday. There’s nothing quite like a perfectly grilled medium-rare sirloin, especially when you don’t own a BBQ. It was expensive, but worth it. Ongoingly though? Mostly disappointing—and occasionally shocking.

A few weeks ago, we went to our local pub. One half order of nachos and one beer for me (water for my partner). Happy hour beer: $6.25. The half-order of nachos: $17.99. With tax and a modest tip, the total came to $32.

One beer. Half an order of nachos.

Pre-Covid, pre-inflation? Maybe $20. It was good. But it’s not becoming a weekly habit.

And then there was Domino’s.

A small gluten-free meat-lovers pizza for me. A medium veggie pizza for my partner. Delivered.

$57.

For two very small pizzas.

Highway robbery.

Dining out: convenient? Yes. Easy? Yes. Cheap? Absolutely not.

Our culture prizes anything that saves time and energy. DoorDash and UberEats do exactly that—we just trade our time and energy for cash.

So if cooking at home saves money, why don’t more people do it?

Partly because cooking has quietly become a lost art.

Basic cooking skills are no longer mandatory in high school. People can graduate without ever picking up a spatula. I remember sewing and cooking being lumped together under Home Economics. What the heck did cooking and sewing have to do with "Economics"?? It didn’t make much sense to me then—but now it does.

Sewing your own clothes used to save money. Fast fashion changed that. Cooking, though? Cooking still saves money. Treating it as optional is short-sighted. And honestly, I’d add gardening to the Home Ec curriculum too.

Another reason cooking fades out is logistics. Two working parents. Conflicting schedules. Soccer practice. Violin lessons. Someone forgot to take something out of the freezer. It’s often easier to order in, eat out, or give up and let everyone fend for themselves. Getting everyone to the table at the same time can feel impossible.

The cook loses it when someone leaves just as dinner’s ready.
“But you haven’t eaten yet!”
“Don’t worry—I’ll grab a burger.”

But often the real issue isn’t that people don’t know how to cook. It’s that they don’t know how to cook flexibly.

A stir-fry calls for sirloin—have you seen the price of sirloin? What about tenderizing a cheaper cut? Using chicken thighs instead of breasts? Or legumes—chickpeas or lentils? When ground beef gets expensive, lentil bolognese gives the meat version a serious run for its money.

It’s the difference between buying the same things out of habit and fainting at the checkout… versus seeing what’s on sale and adapting. Or—gasp—trying something new.

I used to hate eggplant parmesan. Not because I’d eaten it, but because… eggplant. Mushy. Suspicious. Then in 2006, at a conference, it was the only option. I poked at it, tried a corner—and oh my god. Amazing. I found a recipe later, and it’s now a regular.

I’d never have called myself a chef. At university, I had six reliable meals: chili, corned beef hash, fillet of sole, baked salmon, round steak, and tuna mac’n’cheese (KD-style). Over time, I added chickpeas, curries, lentils, eggplant. Spices still trip me up—I cling to recipes for quantities—but beyond that? I might even call myself a chefette.

And yes. Cooking at home has saved us a lot of money.

Which brings me to Starbucks. 

At Starbucks: 12-oz chai tea = $2.68

At home: $0.18 (tea bag) + $0.12 (milk) = $0.40

I’m paying for convenience. For someone else making it. It’s a trade-off.

And hey—it’s still the cheapest thing on the menu.

Further Reading

A couple of news articles about the decline in cooking skills and it's impact on home economics...

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/cooking-skills-decline-1.7064348

https://globalnews.ca/news/5155947/how-to-cook-at-home-more/

Our Experiment with a Meal Kit

Have you received some of those meal kit flyers in the mail? Or been invited to try them by a friend? We got a GoodFood flyer in the mail last June, offering us three free meals and decided to give it a shot.

We had multiple reasons... our lives had gotten super hectic and it was becoming a challenge to get healthy meals onto the table at dinner time. We'd forget to take something out of the freezer and, utterly pooped at the end of the day, fall back on ordering pizza/curry/chow mein via delivery. Which wasn't really helping our budget at all... nor our health. I had been following an American finance blogger who had tried HelloFresh and he said it had helped them. So we though... "why not"...

While there are a few meal kit options in Canada, we went with GoodFood purely because we had a coupon. The promo pics looked good as well - lots of fresh produce and the online recipes were mouthwatering! We chose to order three meals/week with a delivery slot of Fridays. That meant we could have the weekends free and clear. We wouldn't have to think about what to cook, etc.

GoodFood is Good Food!

A GoodFood recipe - mmm
Paprika-Honey Salmon with Lime Sour Cream
over Bulgur with Peas & Roasted Peppers

Our first box arrived and... it was amazing! The recipe cards were easy to follow and everything was perfectly portioned out. Just the right amount of vinegar or carrots or noodles or spices. It was also quick... we could whip a meal together in 30 minutes or less. Their selection/variety was good too - a mixture of meats and even some vegetarian options. The recipes also had some ethnic diversity, introducing us to to exotic flavours from Asia, Africa and the Mediterranean.

Ordering was super easy - just go online, scroll through the options, choose the three meals and voila, Done. And we could make changes up to a week before our delivery date. I loved it!

Overall we gave most of the recipes a 9/10 or 10/10. We were wanting to lick the plate sometimes... they were that good. Except for one recipe... it was the slabs of sesame crusted tofu that we were told to fry in the frying pan. Neither one of us are entranced by tofu and the thick, wobbly slabs were... unpalatable... and actually inedible for both of us. That was the only fail out of dozens of meals.

Oh, and they are Canadian - based out of Montreal - go Canada!

What the contents of a GoodFood box
really look like.

The Not-so-Good

Now... there were also some downsides... First up... the way the food is delivered. It's not like that oh-so-eco-friendly picture above. When you you open the box... it looks more like this...

Everything is bundled in plastic. Each meal (except for the meat) is bundled in a big ziploc bag containing smaller plastic packages with the individual ingredients - lentils, noodles, rice, diced squash, farro, etc.

There are also small plastic screw-top containers with spices, vinegar, miso sauce, curry paste, etc. That's a LOT of plastic. We kept the little plastic containers as they were useful for seeds and what not. But the plastic bags were a bit much.

The other thing I noticed was that the little plastic containers were not labeled. So it was kind of a guessing game as to what was what. There was one time where I mixed up the red wine vinegar with a ponzu sauce or something. Not disastrous since we could scramble to recreate the sauce from our ingredients in our own kitchen but... still... why not label the little containers and vials? Their promo pics show that their containers all have labels but none of ours ever did.

GoodFood promo pic with labeled
plastic containers

The box itself was cardboard with some internal waffle cardboard partitions, some of which had a reflective coating on them. Mostly recyclable.

The food was kept cold by some plastic ice packs. According to the GoodFood site -  "The solution in the ice packs is a water and salt gel designed to get colder than ice. Pop them in your freezer for future uses, or snip off the ends and pour the all-natural solution in the toilet. You'll be left with the plastic wrapping which you can drop into your recycling bin."

Opening a GoodFood box

We tried popping the ice packs in our freezer but... our freezer quickly filled up with ice packs! No one needs that many ice packs... so eventually they went down the toilet. In the packaging department... GoodFood was not so good for the planet.

On top of that... as the weeks/months went on... we found that our grocery/food budget actually went UP! The GoodFood meals cost about $12-15/person/meal. So each week (3 meals) we'd be spending around $70 or $90. Multiply that by 4 weeks and... our GoodFood spending was about $300/month. Which is, honestly, a bit excessive considering our entire grocery budget is around $550/month. True, our eating-out/take-out expenses went down to zero but... all it really did was transfer that to the grocery category. And... we still had to cook four other dinners/week soooo... GoodFood was not so good for our budget.

Easing away from GoodFood

In August, after a couple of months of trying GoodFood, we started skipping weeks. We had visitors... we were away... whatever. We decided to try making some of our favourite GoodFood recipes from scratch using the recipe cards we already had. We found a few that worked quite well (a yummy red lentil curry) and I even tried pulling some new recipes off the GoodFood site. It's much cheaper to make the meals from scratch (duh) but not as convenient... you actually have to measure 30 g of ginger instead of just using what they give to you!

Over the last few months, though, as we've modified our eating plan... the GoodFood recipes don't fit in too well. While they have some vegetarian options, most of those include things like dairy. So... it's unlikely we will be going back to GoodFood, or trying another meal kit.

That's not to say it wasn't a good experience. For this apprentice-chef... it was great to be guided through a process and to see how easy it can be to create yummy flavours with just a few simple ingredients. We were also introduced to some not-so-familiar ingredients like farro, bulgur wheat, udon noodles and goodness knows what else. So there are some tips and tricks that have had a lasting benefit. Have you tried a meal kit? Did you like it?