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Thread: If you can cook you will always live wealthy

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    God/dess rickdugan's Avatar
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    Default If you can cook you will always live wealthy

    Maybe I focus too much on food, Idk. I guess a combination of all the smells today in my house (my wife has been on a baking tear since last night for some reason), the fact that I just dropped more sale meats in my freezer chest, and some recent discussions here about poverty and food, really made me think of this stuff. Also, I post this at the risk of sounding self congratulatory, but this is not meant to be.

    Now good food is more or less a daily thing for us since both my wife and I both cook and she is downright fantastic at it, but days like today remind me of just how lucky we are. They also remind me of why I learned how to cook in the first place. When I was younger and poor, with very limited resources, I figured out that cooking is the great equalizer. If you can cook, you can always live well with healthy and delicious food, even on a very tight budget. Even folks with tight schedules can eat well by cooking freezer friendly dishes that can be re-heated on days that they cannot cook, which I had to do often when I was single (I used to cook my ass off on Sundays, lol).

    I guess that these lessons became hard coded and carried forward to better times, which is one of the reasons why my grocery bill is still low by comparison to others and why nothing gets wasted in our kitchen (bones become stock, fruits on the way out get made into baked goods, etc.). Unfortunately I was well into my 20s before I stopped being so helpless and started learning to feed myself well, but I won't let the same thing happen to my kids. We are already making them watch what we do and, soon enough, they will start doing some of the basics themselves. Should they ever become poor as adults, they will have the skills to transform even the cheapest sale meats and veggies into great meals rather than relying upon shit from cans, jars and frozen food containers, like I did for many years.

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    Veteran Member red.velvet's Avatar
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    Default Re: If you can cook you will always live wealthy

    I always tell people that the reason I've stayed so thin is because I cook all my own meals. Its true and I've saved so much money

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    Featured Member BambiCutie's Avatar
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    Default Re: If you can cook you will always live wealthy

    By constantly cooking homemade dinners, pulling meat out of my diet it makes things easier to focus on working out, good health, while saving money. I try to avoid purchasing canned goods and stick to frozen fruits, veg, beans some fish, tends to be more of a pain in the ass having to haul tons of fresh groceries rather than boxed cereals and junk food individually wrapped.

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    Default Re: If you can cook you will always live wealthy

    My fiancé is a tremendous cook, he can produce flavors that I would normally expect at a four- or five-star restaurant. When he makes something good, it is indeed like a taste of being rich!

    I'm more of a decent/okay cook. You would eat what I make if I put it in front of you, but you probably wouldn't pay a lot of money for it. Still, my food is much healthier than most things I could buy, and the money saved can be put toward the future.

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    God/dess Zofia's Avatar
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    Default Re: If you can cook you will always live wealthy

    BF is a good cook. I like to cook. Our daughter is growing into a pretty good cook. Our kitchen can get crowded. BF says he stays clear of the kitchen when daughter and I are in there. Don't know why?

    Cooking certainly saves money. Even when we are super busy, which seems like all the time, cooking meals saves money and generally are of better quality. Either I or my daughter cook all of her school lunches too. Another money saver. Plus, she'll eat my meals. Not usually the situation with the school lunches.

    Z

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    God/dess miss.a.p1600's Avatar
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    Default Re: If you can cook you will always live wealthy

    True that you can spend say $100/week and get at least a full dinner for 2 for 7 days (plus some leftovers) however this same $100 used eating in restaurants would only last maybe 2-3 days.

    I think the key is knowing WHAT to shop for, being prepared (having a meal plan/recipes), and storing food properly (so as not to waste food because it perished before you got around to cooking it).

    Sometimes it depends too, if you're wealthy would you spend 20 min prepping food, slave over a hot stove for an hour, and then have to do dishes? Or pay someone to do this for you? Some of the wealthy people I know, they rarely cook themselves.

    But yeah if you're not wealthy yet gotta develop those culinary skills put in the sweat equity yourself - DIY. But what you save in money is costing you in time (time it takes to shop for groceries, cook, and clean up) and effort (learning how to save money in groceries, learning how to cook, etc).
    “Cook for him like a housewife, fuck him good like a nympho….pay the rent and the car note, he invests in me like crypto”

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    Default Re: If you can cook you will always live wealthy

    If you want to feel like a badass, make donuts from scratch. So easy, and unbelievably good.
    Where Am I? Missing NYC

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    Default Re: If you can cook you will always live wealthy

    I remember when I was 14-15 looking up "recipes for £1". Never looked back. A Girl Called Jack is a treasure, though.
    I don't mind talking so much as being spoken to. And I don't mind being spoken to all that much, when the one speaking has a brain.

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    Featured Member miss1dancypants's Avatar
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    Default Re: If you can cook you will always live wealthy

    Thank you for this post. For financial and health/weight reasons (I've put on about 10 pounds this winter) I want to dedicate more time to cooking and restrict myself to eating out once a week. I pretty much go out for almost every meal except breakfast, which I make at home. I think a big part of this is because I'm lonely and all of my friends live at least an hour away, but I need to stop making excuses. I'm sure I'll eat healthier and save a lot of money if I eat at home. I probably spend at least $200 a week on going out to eat.

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    God/dess rickdugan's Avatar
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    Default Re: If you can cook you will always live wealthy

    Quote Originally Posted by miss1dancypants View Post
    I pretty much go out for almost every meal except breakfast, which I make at home. I think a big part of this is because I'm lonely and all of my friends live at least an hour away, but I need to stop making excuses. I'm sure I'll eat healthier and save a lot of money if I eat at home. I probably spend at least $200 a week on going out to eat.
    I have a family of 5, which means that we need to put 105 individual meals on the table each week plus provide for snacks, drinks, etc (our 3 kids are in school but bring lunch by choice). Now we do go out once a week for a meal (usually on Sunday), but that leaves 100 individual meals that need to come from our kitchen plus all that other stuff. Our grocery bill averages $130 or less per week and that is not without some fluff in it. That's $3.70 per day per person and that includes meat in at least two of the meals, cheeses, specialty yogurts, fresh veggies, lots of fruit in the fruit bowl, almost 5 gallons of milk per week, eggs, breads and grains, etc.

    Dinners we had over the past week [all of these meals included veggies on the side] include baby back ribs with homemade oven baked mac n cheese; homemade meatballs in sauce over pasta with cheesy bread on the side; stove top pot roast with gravy, potatoes and veggies; homemade chicken stew, which was made from the leftover roasted chicken with pan gravy we had the night before that - you get the picture. We also whip up baked goods once or twice a week, so we always have some homemade cakes, cookies or other treats laying around for desserts or sometimes even breakfast, lol. So for relatively short money we are eating very well.

    Now as miss rightly said, it takes time and some planning to do this. Sometimes we're too busy to cook (my kids all have activities), but we plan by cooking extra on another night and freezing the leftovers. The real time investment though was done a long time ago, when we learned how to cook all of this stuff well in the first place. Now we are versatile enough that we can tailor our menu to whatever can be bought on sale and practiced enough to prepare and cook it fairly efficiently, but there was definitely a learning period and plenty of trial and error to get to that point.

    Anyway, again I'm not trying to sound self congratulatory - plenty of people do this and even more. But this is why I am endlessly bewildered by the notion that almost anyone in this country cannot eat well, including those who rely upon SNAP. We already spend less per month on groceries than the max SNAP benefits for a family my size (which is $771), yet what I posted above is how we eat. And tbh, we're not really trying that hard and could cut it down a fair amount more if we had to (clip coupons, cut out the extra stuff, eat less beef, only buy sale stuff, make more store stops for sales, etc.) and still eat very well. This is why I say that cooking is the great equalizer and I firmly believe that an overall loss of basic kitchen skills among a big % of the population is the single biggest contributor to food issues nowadays.

    Anyway, this will be my last long winded post as I'm getting off my soapbox now.
    Last edited by rickdugan; 02-22-2016 at 01:16 PM.

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