On the day of my bridal shower, I received tons of amazing cooking supplies. When I finished opening gifts, my best friend leaned over and asked me, “What would they say if they knew you couldn’t cook at all?”
It was a running joke that I married my husband for his cooking skills. He comes from a large Italian family and is absolutely amazing at creating meals. On any given weekend, he might get inspired to make homemade pasta and hang them all over our cabinets to dry or he might try his hand at making macaroons — after asking if he could buy some very expensive specialty flour first, of course!
However, a few years into our marriage, my husband decided to go back to school and his long nights combined with an intense study schedule meant that I totally and completely lost my personal chef. He’d spend his nights in the library and I’d scrounge around the kitchen, eventually deciding to make pasta with some olive oil and salt on it.
As you can imagine, I also started ordering a lot of take out, and it wasn’t until we got really serious about budgeting and paying off our credit card debt that I decided to learn how to cook so that we could cut down on the expense.
Here’s how I did it:
1. Start with one dish.
As I said, my husband is Italian, so he always makes his red sauce from scratch. Sure, it would be easier to buy it in the jar, especially for someone new to cooking, but when you make your sauce from scratch it’s far cheaper. You can make a huge batch of it and it can last for weeks in the freezer. So, one Friday night, I got my husband to make it and I wrote down every single step while watching him. I kept that instruction list in a binder on my desk and eventually learned how to make it just as well as he could.
From that one dish I branched out to try other things. For example, once you know how to make a good red sauce, you can then make a pretty good chicken parmesan and then your own lasagna.
So, taking the time to learn that one dish led to me figuring out how to make many others. Watching my husband go through the steps and asking about certain kitchen utensils made it so that I actually understood what regular recipes were saying, too!
2. Research easy and simple recipes.
When you are first getting started learning how to cook, you’ll just get discouraged when you look at recipes with a whole grocery list of ingredients. One of my favorite things to do is search for online is “five ingredient recipes” and I also have a beginner’s cookbook that has several different appetizers all under five ingredients as well.
When you cook meals with a low level of ingredients, you can build your confidence immensely. Soon, you’ll be making really nice sauces for your pork chops or figuring out the ease of a chicken noodle casserole, all things that take just a few ingredients mixed together. Then, the best part is that once you have these ingredients stocked in your home, you cut down on costs even more when you go to make them again.
Remember that you can experiment a little bit with adding an ingredient here or there, but mostly just learning how to follow a recipe and produce a successful meal will get you motivated to do it again and again.
3. Try soups, not salads.
When you’re trying to save money with cooking, it’s important to know the types of meals that are typically low cost. So, we make a lot of red beans and rice, a lot of casseroles and a lot of soups. Salads are amazing and taste so fresh, but once you make a really great salad and add in a ton of ingredients, it can get quite costly.
Because of that, I make far more soups than salads. I’m always amazed that by adding just a bit of vegetable stock and throwing some vegetables and potatoes in a pot, I can create a hearty and homey meal that can last us several days in a row.
4. Double and triple recipes.
I think one reason I always strayed from cooking is that it can really take a lot of time. As a creative person who is interested in the arts, I always said I would rather spend time creating something that lasts instead of something that’s going to be quickly consumed.
However, I realized that if you take the time to make a nice meal, you can double or triple a recipe to make a lot of it, which can free up two more nights of your week to do whatever you want. Cooking really doesn’t have to be time consuming. In fact, I know many frugal and busy moms who will spend three to four hours of their weekend making meals for their entire week so that they can enjoy their kids when they get home instead of chopping vegetables.
So, that’s the story of how I learned to cook. It took almost 10 years of being with my husband for me to finally come around to actually enjoying the process. The fact that it saves me a ton of money every month is just the cherry on top.
More from U.S. News
12 Ways to Save More in the Springtime
10 Ways to Stay in Shape on a Budget
9 Financial Tools You Should Be Using
How One Blogger Learned to Cook and Saved a Fortune originally appeared on usnews.com
