When my husband and I were dating, we would go out to eat in nice restaurants all the time. I found it romantic and he enjoyed the food. Now that we have been married for a few years and have two kids we find that staying on the food budget is top priority which means eating out is now more of a special occasion thing.
If this sounds familiar to you, then like me you may have fallen into what I call “the cooking routine!” I would make the same old five or six meals over and over again week after week. Sometimes my oldest would yell, “mom are we having that again for dinner? Can’t we go out?” My husband would just roll his eyes.
It was only during the holidays or if certain friends were coming over that I would look in my old cookbook and see if I could invent something different. I think there are many of us who can identify with this.
Yes, eating at home has it’s benefits like healthy food and lower costs to feed the family but eating out in our favorite restaurant is always a treat because the choice of food is different and it tastes, yes I admit it, so much better than any of my old meals.
Then one day while I was thinking about convincing my husband to take us out when he got home from work, I got this idea. What if I could figure out exactly how our favorite restaurant actually cooked our meals? Then I could try making them at home. We went out that night and I took a notepad and wrote down everything I could about our meals.
The next night I put my dinner notes to work and cooked one of meals we ordered myself. The result was… A big flop! Everyone tried to be nice but I knew it didn’t taste right. The restaurant must have some secret I don’t know about. It might be in the sauce I thought. Turns out that was a part of it but not the whole problem. Here’s how I solved it.
I spent days researching restaurant food recipes on the Internet in hopes solving my mystery and I finally did. I found exact copy cat restaurant recipes and to my complete surprise they were very easy to make, I just needed to know how to make those easy tasty dinners for my family.
Now my kids have started asking me to please make one of their favorite things that we used to order out. Makes me happy and we’re on budget which makes my husband happy.