I have a few friends that eat out for every meal. They haven’t used their kitchen except to store leftovers. This must be nice for them, but it surely costs them a ton of money. I think that cooking is a mandatory lesson that needs to be learned. You easily pay twice for a meal what you would have paid if you had made it for yourself and probably more like four times for a decent meal. I know it takes time and that time is valuable, but there are surely meals that can be created in less than 15 minutes, that are much better, cheaper, and even quicker than jumping in the car and driving to get takeout.

If you don’t really cook, start small. When my wife and I started cooking, we went through a lot of fazes. We started with bagged meals from Bertolli (these are great). I know, it’s not really cooking for ourselves, but it got us started and it was easy. It got us used to using our pots and pans, our stove, and even the kitchen.

After we got sick of those, we started in on buying other things. We would buy a cut of meat, marinade it and bake it in the oven. Then we would make one of those boxes of mashed potatoes and microwave some green beans. These were good for a while, and we started to add variety into this faze; creamed corn, steaming broccoli, different seasoning on the meats, and different cuts of meat.

Then we moved into faze three. We would find a recipe online and give it a try. To start out, we would follow each recipe to the letter. These meals were hit or miss, but we always got through it. We would select easy recipes with minimal ingredients, because we didn’t have many on hand. We kept adding different ingredients into the mix and new recipes to the catalog.

Now, we know that we’re not the best cooks, but we have become relatively proficient. We can make almost anything taste good. We have really mastered the art of making the flavors all work together. It just takes time and practice. We now use almost the whole spice rack for different meals and don’t have to make excuses when people come over hungry. I can honestly say that I no longer have any pizza joint phone numbers memorized.

Get started. Even if you have to start with frozen Bertolli meals, just do it. Check them out, they really are good. www.bertolli.com