If your sole metric is price, there is some very cheap takeout out there. And, yes, it may well be as cheap or cheaper than meals in the supermarket freezer section.
But while some planning and a little work is needed, stick to cheaper proteins (chicken/pork), vegetables, and things like rice/beans and home cooking, even for one, can be pretty inexpensive and doesn't need to mean eating the same leftover stew for a week.
I do think a lot of "cooking at home is too expensive" is actually "I don't want to cook at home and would rather just get takeout."
ADDED: And especially if you relax the cost constraint a little bit, there are a ton of meals I can make from unprocessed or minimally processed frozen food in about 15 minutes from freezer to table. Less than $10 for a meal is trivial--and can be significantly less than that.
Well, we cook at home almost every meal throughout the year. Something I noticed compared to old country that for lot of people here each meal is always about the food they like to eat at that time. Whereas for us that likeness/preferred meal is only couple times a week or so. Most meals are really like rotation of stuff from pantry and fridge.
If I were to eat only meals I feel like eating all the time it would be too much of mental hassle even if I could afford to purchase ingredients.
> I do think a lot of "cooking at home is too expensive" is actually "I don't want to cook at home and would rather just get takeout."
Well, yeah, it shouldn’t be a surprise that many don’t like the actual acts of planning, prepping, and cooking, and would rather eat takeout everyday if it was nutritious and affordable enough, or have their meals cooked for them
EDIT: I struggle with this too and am trying to change my mindset to cooking being just something you need to survive, like brushing your teeth, and trying to enjoy it more from that aspect
Yeah, i think it's a real problem that a lot of cooking writing and education out there is pitched toward hobbyists. You certainly can enjoy cooking (i do!), but it's also fine for it to be a chore that you want to get done as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Read cooking blogs or watch cooking shows and you probably get the impression that cooking is way more time consuming and requires way more ingredients than are really required to put food on the table. But there are whole cookbooks of recipes that use just a few ingredients plus a handful of standard pantry staples.
As you cook you also learn a lot of shortcuts you can really get off with most of the time. Using lemon juice from a jar is really fine. You don't need to have that sprig of parsely. You can probably get away with using dried herbs rather than fresh for many purposes.
Absolutely agree with all of this. I think a person trying to dip their toe into cooking could easily get the impression online that it's way more precious and difficult than it really is.
I am still in this journey myself and what's really made it a lot easier is seeing it as a skill that has a lot of opportunity to be improved, with regards to speed/effeciency, ie how many net minutes per week I actually have to spend.
There are so many ways to tweak and "automate" this, much like the effeciency of software development tasks, such as finding pairs of recipes that reuse the same intermediate components, making things in batches that can be frozen and reheated, and just plain getting faster at making something from practice.
There is a lot to be said for making the same recipe many times rather than always trying new ones. Each time you make it you will get faster, and even better, more able to do it without thinking much about it, and keep thinking about something else more useful instead.
Man, I've been trying to make good fried rice for like thirty years. Let me know if you figure it out... supposedly needs a lava-hot wok and a gallon of oil or something.
I don't associate fried rice with a lot of oil. Maybe the hot wok. Woks can be problematic on electric ranges. Cooks Illustrated actually recommends using a skillet instead.
This[1] is the best method/recipe I've found for making fried rice without a wok. This is the finale in a series where the host is trying to perfect the method for making fried rice, but ends showing you how to make it at home with a cast iron frying pan.
Yeah, I think people try to optimize their budget a little too much. I doubt everybody is barely making the cut to get any food. A lot are just lazy. Me included sometimes. Spend a few extra bucks, and get something that's less likely to give you cancer. The end result can be very satisfying when you're finished making it, and you don't feel like a pig afterwards.
I admit there are evenings when I just don't feel like cooking at all--although a lot of the time I then realize it would be more effort/time to hop in the car and get takeout. I also admit that if I lived in a city and had good takeout options like decent Chinese within a 5 or 10 minute walk, I'd probably get takeout more.
I've been mostly working at home (or traveling) for years now but when I was going into an office, a had a repertoire of quick and easy weeknight meals--and others that I could make on weekends and give me one or two meals of leftovers.
I enjoy cooking a lot (which can be parsed two ways and I mean both of them) but of course I feel like that sometimes too.
But once you're into it, that's simple, those are the nights you have leftovers, something from the freezer (made before), or 10-15min pasta & grilled vegetables.
(To be honest my problem is more not feeling like that often enough, so I always make something new and the freezer fills up. Also eating from the freezer comes with the problem of not remembering exactly what you did, if it's particularly good and you want it again...)
But while some planning and a little work is needed, stick to cheaper proteins (chicken/pork), vegetables, and things like rice/beans and home cooking, even for one, can be pretty inexpensive and doesn't need to mean eating the same leftover stew for a week.
I do think a lot of "cooking at home is too expensive" is actually "I don't want to cook at home and would rather just get takeout."
ADDED: And especially if you relax the cost constraint a little bit, there are a ton of meals I can make from unprocessed or minimally processed frozen food in about 15 minutes from freezer to table. Less than $10 for a meal is trivial--and can be significantly less than that.