Preparing your own meals is usually cheaper and healthier than dining out (or reheating ready-made frozen meals). It’s fun, but also time-consuming. How many meals do you make for yourself each day?
Preparing your own food boasts a number of advantages. Cooking is cheaper, you control exactly what goes into a dish, and you can often impress people while doing it. We’ve shown you how to master oven basics to extend your cooking repertoire and how to improve your home cooking through science. And if you need a little push, we’ve also covered how you can break your addiction to takeaway.
So, how about you? Whether you’re cooking from scratch or just putting together a sandwich or salad, we’d like to know:
Expand on your approach in the comments if you wish.
Comments
8 responses to “How Many Meals Do You Prepare For Yourself Each Day?”
None – unless you count microwaving Lite n Easy meals – I live alone, work stupid hours, and I’m incredibly lazy…
I eat out pretty much everyday, maybe cooking a meal once or twice a week. I work and study, its usually around 9pm when I’m done for the day. My husband will pick me up, we’ll have dinner outside, come back home and catch up on ‘us’ time or catch up on work/studies. As we are incredibly busy individuals, we just don’t have the mental space and energy to spend time cooking, particularly because we both have different dietary preferences and because we are of a cultural descent (this is where I find Aussies have it so much easier in terms of cooking) a typical meal usually takes at least a minimum of 1 1/2 hours to cook; we don’t usually have one-pot meal types in both our cultures (except maybe porridge for sick people), save for the occasional pasta dish.
We have (some) catch-up work, advocacy and volunteer activities during the weekends as well, which means more eating out with various people.
I can spend 6-8 hours cooking an entire week’s worth of meals on the only day I actually have an entire day free to myself, but I’d rather have that day spent on leisure activities than over a hot stove. Which is a bit of a pity, because I do genuinely enjoy cooking and exploring new dishes, but money for us isn’t the issue – we are already busy as is – so money for us buys us time and peace of mind to invest in building other things.
Back in our younger days, I used to cook 4-5 days a week as I had the time to do so, with weekends being our eat-out days. It was fun while that lasted because I enjoyed the family time feeling of home-cooked food at the family table.
May I ask which cultures? I thought one pot meals existed pretty much everywhere. Or maybe that’s just my laziness that forces them to be one pot!
Depends on how loosely we can use the term cooking. Here’s yesterday –
Breakfast: combined coffee, protein powder, and chocolate milk in a blender.
Lunch: Cut up cucumber and tomato, added it to baby spinach, pulled apart some BBQ chicken, added cottage cheese.
Afternoon tea: Spread peanut butter on corn thins, cut up banana.
Dinner: As per lunch, with pan fried salmon + blanched broccoli instead of chicken + cheese.
The only thing that I would really class as “cooking” is the salmon and broccoli, but I didn’t eat out at all.
I am so stealing that breakfast idea. I’ve made similar things, but it never occurred to me to put coffee in there. Pure brilliance!
Aww thanks! I only did it because I need coffee first thing.. and now I’m hooked 😉
I’m a uni student who is living on res, so I cook all of my meals. I’ll probably eat out once a week though, more if I end up going to the city. I only have 2 meals a day though, I’m not a breakfast person.
It kinda depends. Weekdays either boyfriend or I will cook dinner, but lunch is bought 90% of the time and breakfast is often a piece of fruit and an Up and Go or a coffee. On the weekends, we always make breakfast together (at what could pass for lunch time) and whether we cook or eat out for dinner depends entirely on how much we had to drink the night before 😛