CopyKat.com is the creation of Stephanie Manley. Stephanie started publishing recipes on the web in 1995 as a means to capture her family recipes in a format that they would not be thrown away.
Over the years 
Cooking at home has many benefits. You can save money from cooking at home. You can prepare food exactly the way you like it. You can also have more control over what you eat when you prepare it yourself. These are just a few of the benefits of cooking at home. There are more benefits from cooking food at home, but let’s look at each one of those statements closely.
You really can save money from cooking at home. Going out to dinner costs both money and time. Let’s look at how long it takes to get to a restaurant, you have to get into the car, drive there, park, wait in line to be seated, wait for your service, wait for your food, eat your meal, then you get to do all of this in reverse. So this could take an hour or longer, not to mention the cost of the fuel you spend on getting there. Often you can prepare a meal in 15 to 20 minutes. Cooking a meal often costs much less than buying it already prepared. Let’s say I want to make a spaghetti dinner for 4, a box of pasta costs around 1.30, a pound of sausage or ground meat 4.00, spaghetti sauce 5.00, you can add in some bread and garlic butter for around another 3 dollars. So for 17 dollars you can buy 4 servings of spaghetti sauce with meat, whereas in a restaurant, you are paying at least 9 dollars a plate. Here alone you are saving half of the cost of the meal.
So often restaurants add in extra salt and fat to make food more tasty. There is no doubt that extra fat and salt enhances the flavor of many meals, but often these two ingredients are over used. Cooking at home allows you to chose how much salt and fat to add into your food. You can also spice a dish more if you desire, if you like your food spicy, you can make it spicy at home. When I prepare salads at home, I add in toasted nuts, this isn’t something I can get at a standard salad bar. If I want a little extra fresh chives on my baked potato, I can add those at home, I can’t do that as easily in a restaurant.
When you prepare food at home, you can control how you prepare the food, you control the portion size. Sure, getting a to go box is easy to do when your food comes, but it seems really hard to divide up the food in half when it comes out. We tend to over eat when we go into restaurants, portions are typically large, and if you are enjoying the people you are dining with, you may have the tendency to overeat. When you are home, it is easier to serve up right sized portions or even to package them up for lunch the next day.
These are just a few of the benefits of cooking at home. You really can save money by cooking at home. Cooking your own dinner often costs far less than its counterpart in a restaurant. You can prepare food how you like it, perhaps you like a little less salt, or maybe you like it spicier. You can save time, by cooking at home, you don’t have to leave, find parking, wait for your service person, you are totally in control when you prepare food at home.
The problem is that I want to cook more but, in NYC where produce is so expensive it cost way more to cook at home. Too bad, but, I agree that your argument is true most of the time.
I think the cooking at home trend will continue. ….. and grocery prices are falling, which makes the decision to cook at home eaven easier.
This is a very convincing article, and I’ll use it for helping convince friends and family in the future to cook at home instead of eating out. Cooking is, after all, an amazing hobby. I’ll look forward to more recipes, and trying ones you’ve listed already, out.