Keep It Clean!

Preparing most of your meals from scratch is a great way to save money and take care of your health. However, many of us, especially families where both adults work full time, have a hard time maintaining the motivation to cook a homemade dinner every evening. Fortunately, there is a way to practically guarantee that you’ll actually stick to your plan to cook at home: keep your kitchen clean.

Donnie and I have made a serious commitment to cooking at home almost every night. Even before we were frugal, we preferred to eat homemade meals than restaurant food. However, some nights we were so exhausted from school and work that we really didn’t feel like making anything from scratch. On those nights, going home to a sink full of dirty dishes and counter-tops covered in groceries that hadn’t yet been put away was the last straw. If we were exhausted, and our kitchen was a mess, we gave in and got pizza. We weren’t happy with ourselves, but we were just so tired.



However, even on the nights when we least felt like cooking, if our kitchen was already tidy, well-organized, and ready for immediate use, we were almost always able to pull ourselves together and get a decent meal on the table. If we didn’t face the prospect of having to spend twenty minutes cleaning up before we could even begin to think about cooking, we were okay. There’s just something so much less exhausting about preparing a meal in a pleasant, clean environment than in a cluttered, chaotic one. Now that we’re committed to frugality, we’ve made a point to keep our kitchen in decent shape at all times. It makes sticking to our resolution much easier!

If you’re firmly committed to the idea of eating at home most nights of the week, and especially if you’ve been having trouble keeping that commitment, then make a resolution to keep your cooking area as neat and tidy as possible. This may seem challenging if there are no adults at home during the day, but it can be done. After dinner each evening, wash your dishes (or load the dishwasher), put away all your leftovers, and wipe down your countertops. If you want to soak a particularly crusty pan, make sure you do it right away. In the morning, make sure your breakfast dishes are at the very least cleared off the table and stacked neatly to be washed after work. Practice these small clean-up routines daily, and you’ll kick the take-out habit in no time. Bon apétit!