I am convinced that we spend WAY too much money eating out. With 3 hungry boys and a hungry husband to feed, it was gotten expensive to eat out. Even fast food is about $30 a pop. My two oldest just aren’t satisfied with “Kid’s meals” any more and going to a sit down meal is $60+ dollars and doing even once or twice a week adds up. Half the time we are eating out I am not really pleased with the meal. It is very rare that when I cook at home dinner is not delicious and satisfying. It’s really the mess and pure laziness that is the problem. Well, that and now that my kids’ baseball seasons have started we are busy with games and practices 3-5 days a week. Enough is enough though. It’s time to quit spending all this mula and cook at home. We are going to go 30 without eating out. Here I plan to blog the meals we are having. Now let me tell you now these will not all be healthy and there may be some repeats. I would like to try as many new things as possible so PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE feel free to send me your recipes or favorite sites for recipes. I will be also looking for some lunch and breakfast recipes for the weekends with every one is home. I am also going to try to keep all recipes budget friendly. Lastly…. I can’t promise you that all recipes will be a hit. I am going to post the good and the bad. With all that being said here is what we had the last two nights.
Day 1 was just a boring old Shake-n-Bake pork chop and Rice-a-roni night. The kids and the hubby love this so I try to throw it in there ever couple of weeks or so.
Day 2 we tried a crock pot recipe off of Budget Savvy Diva’s website. Not So Sloppy Joes. This is a really simple take on sloppy joes that is a crown pleaser even for the pickiest kids. I did not add onions to mine since I hate them but I did add plenty of onion powder and spiced it up a little with some chili powder and cayenne pepper. My husband LOVED these.
Tonight I will do a more in-depth post on tonight’s dinner since I didn’t decide to blog about this till just now. I plan to post every night or the next morning on what we had for dinner and if we try a new recipe for lunch or breakfast. I will not promise to post every day because let’s face it, I probably won’t. I am not the great blogger in history. Oh well.
Remember to comment, share, and subscribe. Oh and again if you have a great recipe for me to try let me know.. Especially crock pot recipes (which a lot of mine will be)
Thanks for reading!
Adventures in Knottyland 
Great plan! I’ll be watching to see how it works out
I am going to do my best to keep it updated regularly.
Awesome! Can’t wait to see what you do. You should try to calculate how much you save over the period of 30 days if you can… that would be super interesting as well…
I would like to do that I am just not sure how.. Maybe I should go back and see how much we spent eating out the last 30 days. Caleb is still buying his lunch.. I try to get him to take his lunch but he doesn’t really like left over (which irks me) and he is super forgetful and always forgets to take his lunch with him. We have been talking about giving him a weekly lunch allowance.
On the subject of Caleb packed lunches.. what about making homemade cookies, granola bars, rice crisp treat.. etc. send him with his favorite veggies/fruit and instead of making sandwiches with bread use tortillas.. my 13 year old daughter would much rather have her lunch packed then nasty school lunches and I like the fact I know what she’s eating is better for her.. less salt, sugar and added chemicals.. my daughter is the most picky eater around..
On the 30 days not eating out.. good for you and your family 🙂 We’ve done it many times, it saves a ton of money, eating healthier (even if it’s shaking bake chicken your still getting real chicken).. yes, it’s from pure laziness from me not wanting to cook when we eat out and the only cooking I like of my husband’s is his grilled food… and during the week after working 12 hours I don’t expect him to cook for me because I was crazy busy doing errands..
You can do the 30 days not eating out.. it’s easier then you think.. 🙂
Caleb is actually my husband but I am sure he would appreciate cookies and rice crispy treats! 🙂
I knew we were spending a ton eating out but yesterday I actually looked up the numbers and in the last 30 days we have spent $636.36 just eating out. Just thinking of all the other places that money could have gone really upsets me. I know we can do 30 days. I just think it will be more of an effort to keep the menu fresh and exciting and not eat the same things over and over again. I try to add 2-3 new things each week. I do typically cook 5 days a week. I have been slacking a little bit with spending more evenings at the baseball fields. It’s really the weekends that get us. We tend to be out on the weekends and it’s so much easier to just eat out since we are already out. I want to start planning our outings more around meal times so we are eating at home.
OMG $636 that is CRAZY!!! Ok I went and looked since Feb through today we have spent about $1100 eatting out. How freaking sad is that? OMG makes me want to cry
Sad is right!