In the current economy, most people are trying to make cuts in their home budgets. One of the first places frugal Americans begin is with restaurant expenditures. Many people have become almost completely dependent upon others to prepare all of their meals. If you are looking to save some cash and consider yourself helpless in the kitchen there is hope. It is not necessary to attend Le Cordon Bleu to be able to save money by preparing meals yourself. When learning any new skill it is best to start with a few basics and eventually build upon them. I suggest that you learn to prepare three basic types of dishes to satisfy your culinary needs. You should select a single dish within each category according to your personal taste and preferences then learn to prepare it from scratch and memory. Since it is not possible to suggest a specific dish which would satisfy everyone’s needs, it is far more practical to suggest guidelines for selecting your dish within each category.
The first type of dish that should be learned is the “quick, easy, and cheap” meal. The second is the “for a crowd” meal. The third and final dish is the “special occasion” meal. No type is more important than the others and each specific dish, within each category, should be selected according to personal taste and preference.
The first type, the “quick, easy, and cheap” is ideal for times when you are looking to satisfy your hunger in a quick and inexpensive manner without resorting to going out for a McCoronary. This dish should meet several criteria. When selecting this dish you should be sure that it will take no longer than about 25 minutes to prepare from start to finish. Also, the requisite ingredients should ideally be things you have on hand at all times so that a trip to the grocery store can be avoided. Most recipes found online and in books today come with a difficulty rating, consulting this rating will help determine whether the dish qualifies as “easy.” Ideally, this dish should also take no more than 1-2 pots or pans. After all, if making the dish requires doing dishes for an hour or so after you are finished with your meal the “quick” and “easy” criterion are not really met. Everyone has a different idea of what “cheap” is. As a general rule of thumb, each serving should cost the same or less than whatever you would be eating if you were to step out for a cheap meal. Certain dishes, lentil soup for example, can easily undercut (in price and flavor) even the “dollar menu” items at fast food establishments. Always consider how many meals you expect to get from what you cook. It is also advisable not to choose for your “quick, easy, and cheap” dish something which requires highly seasonal ingredients, but more on that later.
Dining out is an inherently social undertaking, yet there is no reason to forgo the pleasant company of family and friends simply because you are avoiding restaurants. In fact, meals prepared and served in one’s own home often make for a more intimate dining experience than that which can be had at any restaurant. By going to the effort of preparing a meal by hand and inviting guests into your home, you are demonstrating the importance and value you place on their friendship. So in many ways, having a group over to your home for dinner is actually preferable to dining out.
When selecting the perfect dish to learn to prepare for your hungry crowd several factors must be considered. Price is of course an important factor. Since you will be entertaining people you presumably care about, you want your dish to be inexpensive rather than seem inexpensive. When selecting the perfect “for a crowd” dish be sure that it includes one or more ingredients which are relatively inexpensive, filling, and tasty. Pasta dishes fit the bill rather well as do rice dishes; however, dishes which feature large quantities of potatoes should be avoided. Potatoes are a bit too bland and are overused as a cheap filler ingredient. Another thing to consider is how well the dish will keep once it is done. Anything that requires constant tending even after it is ready to serve will prevent you from being able to enjoy the company of your guests.
When cooking for a group you must carefully walk a tightrope with bland and boring on one side and too adventurous on the other. While something like roast beef might be enjoyable, it is ubiquitous in American households and unlikely to leave a lasting impression on your guests. Similarly, tripe is a fantastic and flavorful ingredient but is probably too adventurous for the average dinner guest. It is also advisable to choose a dish which is not likely to interfere with a significant number of peoples dietary preferences. This does not mean that everything must be free range, organically grown, and vegan but if the entire thing is deep fried you might want to reconsider. As with the “quick, easy, and cheap” dish, it is important to choose a dish that requires as few pots and pans as possible though limiting it to 1-2 as before is probably impractical. It is extremely helpful if many of the components of the dish can be easily cooked at the same time, this greatly reduces the total time spent in the kitchen.
The third and final dish, the one for special occasions need not be overly difficult or complicated. The special occasion dish does have some unique criterion which it must meet if it is to meet the standards of your significant other or honored guest. This dish must be elegant but not tortured into pretentious shapes or designs. If the recipe requires you to purchase special equipment for molding or shaping your dish then it is not the one for you. The flavor of the food, not the presentation, should be the primary focus of the dish but care should still be taken to ensure that it is presented in a neat and clean manner which entices the diner. Remember that if your recipe is filled with rich ingredients such as heavy cream or butter the portion should be smaller. This is especially true if you are serving a woman, few women would be enthusiastic about trying to eat their weight in beurre blanc sauce no matter how delicious. While a sauce is not an absolutely necessary component of the “special occasion” dish it is advisable. Few things can bring as much flavor, elegance, and character to a dish as a fine sauce. That said, if you are a novice, a hollandaise sauce is probably not the place to begin but an excellent alfredo sauce can be learned with surprisingly little effort. This dish should also be something that is not eaten on a regular basis. This excludes dishes such as steak, spaghetti, salmon, and many chicken dishes. Of course chicken itself cannot be excluded but the most common preparations of chicken are. The purpose of the “special occasion” dish is to leave a lasting, memorable impression upon your guest.
Just because this dish is intended for special occasions does not necessarily mean that it must consist exclusively of expensive and rare ingredients. In fact, it is probably best to forgo cliché items such as lobster and show your guest what you can do with basic ingredients and perhaps a few special accoutrements. Well cooked chicken with a simple saffron cream sauce will likely leave more of an impression on your guest than would lobster of filet mignon.
A few general guidelines should be considered when selecting the perfect dish for any of the three categories. Highly seasonal ingredients should be avoided unless you are fairly good at using substitutes which are in season. For example, if the dish you are considering requires fresh asparagus then you might want to reconsider, asparagus in December can command quite a premium. If however, broccoli is a key ingredient, this poses little concern as it is readily available in both fresh and flash frozen form. It is sometimes necessary to buy ingredients which cannot easily be found in their fresh form; in this case it is virtually always better to select frozen rather than canned products. It should be noted that pork is often cheaper than beef and due to people’s fear of the virus formerly known as Swine Flu (now H1N1) pork prices have substantially declined.
Hopefully after learning to expertly prepare your chosen dishes you will come to see cooking as more enjoyable experience rather than a chore to be dreaded and will elect to continue your culinary education by attempting to prepare different dishes. At the very least, you should be able to save a substantial amount of money. By following these guidelines to select the three different dish types and then learning to prepare each dish from scratch and from memory you should be able to liberate yourself from expensive restaurants and TV dinners.
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And some of the weird detractors this site has attracted lately (good, I say, demonstrates rising visibility) claim that Austrians don’t present “solution” or dispense practical advice.
This was a great post. I, for one, wouldn’t mind seeing more like it… Austrian Home Economics.
AAArrrghhh! Tripe?!?!
Damn, Mr. Armstrong.
But you should know this will only hurt the economy even more, because it doesn’t create restaurant jobs. If restaurants make money, they can spend it on other things, and other people can spend that money etc. so it has a multiplier effect. We should make individual cooking illegal because it obviously hurts society. And why not just ban gardening too? If you make your own food, you’re putting farmers out of work. We should destroy home gardens to raise prices of food and put more money in farmers’ pockets, because that stimulates the economy.
I don’t know if the comment to ban home gardening was written in seriousness, but in fact the USA is headed in that direction with patented/copyrighted crop seeds from Monsanto. To keep crop species pure, it is likely there will have to be regulation of seed use and licensing of seed users, aka home gardeners. In more sane times this idea may have sounded outrageous; these days it is just an expected regulation for out own good.
I eat breakfast cereal all day. No cooking needed, all the vitamins and nutrients needed and it’s delicious.
No need for cooking and I save tons of money.
Of course I wasn’t serious, but that’s what Keynesians would say. It’s the broken garden fallacy.
What we need is a new federal government program with a new cooking czar/dictator. The aim would be to provide cafeteria quality food at Delmonico prices.
EndTheFed,
I love it. You crack me up. The Broken Window Hypothesis is one of my favorites!
I thought self sufficiency was the road to serfdom?
In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure cooking at home is much cheaper than eating at a fast decent place like Jimmy Johns or Moes.
Cooking at home can be cheaper than eating out, Nathan.
I just fed my family of four dinner (beef curry over rice, with watermelon for dessert) for about $8 all told, and $5 of that was the meat.
A sheet pizza in a jelly roll pan is about the same, and provides next day’s lunch besides.
Grilled adobo chicken, corn, black beans and rice, and cheese quesadillas is probably even a little cheaper than that.
Assuming you make say $20 an hour and spent half an hour making the meal, your meal really cost around $18. If you could quantify the amount of extra time you spent at the grocery store, and the extra electricity needed to cook the food, you are somewhere north of 20 bucks. I’m willing to bet you could find a similar amount of food in a 5 minute stop at the same price on your way home.
Now of course some people derive some enjoyment out of cooking and spending time with your family or perhaps you watch the news while cooking, and that’s hard to quantify.
I’m just pointing out that eating at home is become less relevant as capital investments and increasing returns to scale in food joints makes the speed and price of food a tough choice for those making money.
In my case, more often than not I’m lazy (and want more time to read mises.org!) so I stick to the simplest stuff or eat out.
“making money” should read “saving money”
Yeah, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to spend an hour cooking and doing dishes every night if you make $20/hr (after taxes). However, Mr. Armstrong’s point is that in tough economic times, people are out of work, have less work and make less money than before, and/or otherwise want to save money for things they can’t do themselves. Yeah, you have to spend more of your time to save a few dollars per day, but that’s the type of tradeoff people unfortunately have to increasingly make.
The post is hilarious! I love it though I must disagree with the author for recommending non seasonal vegetables – which deprives him from some originality all year long. It is much preferable to develop 4 sets of seasonal menus. Fresh local vegetable that travel less will in general display a higher quality/price ratio …
Nathan’s working wage calculation fails at the factor “family mutiplication” which matters not so much on Mises.org… though, giving the fact there probably are a lot of young students reading (student food…yuck).
However, when cooking for your wife and five kids… it divides the wage costs relatively. Plus it’s the only place where you can legally let your children work and do the dishes with you for very cheap!!!
There are lots of other social factors that speak in favor of good home cooking. If you’re into good wines, you will have some trouble to get a better deal than at home. Of course quite a few restaurants in Europe offer you to buy a “cork right” (15€ for upper quality resaurant) which allows you to bring your own Dom Perignon 1974 on the restaurant table… yet again, you’ll have to count the cost of the cab that brings you back home. Drunk driving crack down is a factor. If your guests are sleeping at home, start calculate the hotel service savings too now.
Interestingly, according to taste, you may find that the truly unbeatable quality/price ratio for restaurants are located in the higher classes…
Don’t pay attention to Marco and his prejudices against tripe.
Google “callos a la madrileña” for a nice recipe!
“â€â€â€â€We should destroy home gardens to raise prices of food and put more money in farmers’ pockets, because that stimulates the economy.â€â€â€’
In Wickard v. Filburn in 1942 the Supreme Court ruled that growing food on your own land for your own use is Interstate Commerce and so it can be regulated by the Federal Government
A person cooking his own food for practical reasons indicates that the division of labor is not being allowed to operate to its full potential. I would think that in a free market society of sufficient population density, many people wouldn’t bother owning a proper kitchen.
A general note to those trying to use some opportunity cost calculations:
There are several scenarios in which it may be cheaper to dine out rather than cook. However a person’s wage rate only counts as an opportunity cost if they stopped working to cook. Regardless of how much a person makes, if he or she gets off at 5 pm then cooks instead of watching television, the opportunity cost is television not the wage rate.
Opportunity cost does not necessarily have to be quantified in dollars.
“In Wickard v. Filburn in 1942 the Supreme Court ruled that growing food on your own land for your own use is Interstate Commerce and so it can be regulated by the Federal Government”
Growing food for my own use is *interstate* commerce?
“â€â€â€Growing food for my own use is *interstate* commerce?â€â€’
Yes. Since you are growing your own food this means you are not buying out of state food and therefore you are effecting interstate commerce. And since you are effecting interstate commerce then the Federal Government gets to regulate you. I think they have toned down this ruling a little in later rulings but the idea is still there.
The Interstate Commerce Clause is probably one of the most misused clauses in the entire Constitution. Every time the FED Gov expands it power its often uses the Interstate Commerce Clause.
It’s like the American Express advertisements for me. Home cooking is priceless. No restaurant can provide the perfectly thoughtful, simply fresh, spontaneous, essentially diet restrictive, ingredient disclosing, home-grown deliciousness of your own home.
Why aren’t there more of these kind of posts? It shows that economics doesn’t have to be dull as dishwater and serves a useful purpose in everyday life.
Terrific post! I love the conversation that it generated here. Only an Austrian could turn cooking into a lesson in economics!
Going to the restaurant takes time, waiting for the waiter too, and you also will have to wait for the food!
So, the only save in time is the clean-up, and maybe even you lose time traveling to the restaurant.
Are the 5 minutes of cleaning worth paying 5 times?
And also cooking is a esencial surviving skill, having food at home may saved your life in a crisis and will make you wiser and more aware of the world you live in and will help you get laid.
Taras and Bobby are correct. There should be more posts that make economic thinking available to those who don’t have Ph. D’s! If economics were more accessible to everyone, people would probably try to educate themselves more.
This post seems reminiscent of some of Jeffrey Tuckers articles on Lew Rockwell.com.
The arguments against eating out given here in the comments are based on conditions in the current, very un-free market, where, as I said above, the division of labor in food preparation is not being allowed to operate to its full potential.
All the talk of banning home gardening is a little overblown.. but not entirely out of the question. There is current legislation in the house that has the power to do just that, whether or not that is the intent. The new “Food Safety Modernization Act” has far reaching implications. Educate yourselves. HR 875 and the supporting legislation of HR 759.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:h875:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:h.r.00759:
An entertaining and informative article. Thank you Mr. Armstrong.
None of this seems to address the fact that to many people cooking is lame.
I can only conclude that the point being made is: forget division of labor; assemble in self-sufficient communes.
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