> Going back before frozen dinners you're back to the time when people actually cooked at home, going out to eat was a rare treat rather than a daily occurrence.
Fwiw some of us still cook at home and go out rarely. It’s cheaper, tastier, healthier, and can be a pretty relaxing evening activity
It was common when you had a stay-at-home parent who did fresh shopping in the day then cooked a meal later for when their spouse (husband) came in just before 6pm (6.30 if he'd stopped off for a pint on the way home)
Not so common when people get in from picking the kids up from daycare at 7.30pm and have to be up and out by 7am the next morning.
Longer commutes, less time at home, and all that extra income has gone into housing and childcare costs. Yeay.
We've made our lives and society so busy and complicated. I've always been confused by how much we collectively value convenience products/services while simultaneously making everything more complex.
I do hope that everyone is living the life they want and I'm just out of touch though. The idea of being away from home and my kids for 12+ hours every day and eating out before going to bed and doing it all over sounds miserable to me, but to each their own!
Sure, there are absolutely people helping make it happen but we each have to accept our due blame for allowing and accepting it.
Companies won't make products that no one will buy. Bosses can't fill roles that no one is willing to take. Executives won't keep their job if employees choose to leave the company rather than work for them.
The one real downside is that learning to cook well at home spoils eating out - it sets your standards for what constitutes a good meal that much higher. If I'm spending €16 on a plate of pasta, it better be a lot better than I can make myself.
You are so right. There are very few things I look forward to when thinking about eating out - french fries is one. I don't deep fry and air fry or baked at home does not compare to the real thing.
Steak is one where I've had better at a restaurant, but it was a $100/person type of place that work paid for. Mine at home is not quite there, but far above the average steak.
When I eat out now I'm hoping to find some combination of spices I don't use or some new idea to take home.
Once I learned how to make a great steak at home, the appeal of going to a high-end steak house has completely lost its appeal.
Sous vide makes steaks 100% idiot-proof. Takes zero skill to get a perfect steak every time. Kosher salt, pepper, granulated garlic, vacuum seal it, drop it into the circulator for ~2 hours, then use whatever the hottest method of cooking you have available to give a quick sear on each side. I use my gas grill pre-heated to about 800 degrees.
But to really kick it up another level, get yourself a smoker. Doesn't have to be a fancy $2000+ offset, a $600 Traeger or even a $200 electric can give good results. Smoke at 225F until it gets to about 125F internal, then sear like above. If you like it extra smokey, you can smoke at a lower temperature.
Now, the only expensive meals I will go out for are seafood. I haven't quite mastered seafood. Fish can be very delicate and fall apart, and it's hard to get the right color on shrimp without overcooking it and drying it out.
The trick with steak, I’ve found, is to think “Steak is $50”. Then you spend that money at the butcher instead of a restaurant. Put it on a skillet for a couple minutes each side and voila, you have a delicious steak way better than you’d find at any normie non-michelin-star restaurant.
Cooking is 60% having good ingredients, 30% avoiding mistakes, and 10% technique.
Steak is the one thing I can get consistently better than restaurants. It's all thanks to the book "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking"
It's a text book size cookbook. The author experiments different cooking methods and documents, taste tests.
It boiled down to seasoning the steak over night so the salt extracts juices and tenderizes. Getting the temperature just perfect using a thermometer (I have a Ninja Foodi Grill that does it automatically).
The quality and thickness of meat also matters. I get mine at Costco or Sam's Club.
My pasta game is a lot better too. Main thing was to stir as the pasta cooks.
Eating at home made me realize how hard restaurants lean on salt and fat to make food taste good.
I don't like eating out anymore because it's all either expensive greasy over seasoned food, or extremely expensive tiny portion food that maybe tastes about the same as home cooked.
We're one of those families as well. We eat out once or twice a month, usually its a social thing when we're going to visit friends or family.
It definitely takes some effort up front. It took us a few years to really build up a good list of go-to recipes we like and get to the point where we could wing it in the kitchen without chasing down recipes for everything.
Part of our motivation was going further down the rabbit hole learning how industrial agriculture and the food industry actually work. Dig far enough and you'll want to plant a garden, raise chickens, and cook at home as much as you can.
> It definitely takes some effort up front. It took us a few years to really build up a good list of go-to recipes we like and get to the point where we could wing it in the kitchen without chasing down recipes for everything.
It can take a bit of time to get to the point where you can experiment and still be confident that the result will be edible, but that time investment is definitely worth it. It’s nice to be able to improvise whatever recipe depending on what’s actually available. It’s like a puzzle game, a kind of reverse Tetris when opening the fridge.
(It’s also nice to have a bunch of no-brain required easy and quick recipe for when you don’t want a challenge)
I have been doing this more and more, for the reasons you cite. Also, restaurants are increasingly doing things (like requiring the use of apps or websites) that make the experience far more unpleasant than it used to be.
So my habits have changed to eating out much more rarely, but at much nicer restaurants.
I often see this mentioned during discussions of home cooking as if it were objective truth, but it confuses me because I enjoy a pie from the local pizza parlor as much as I enjoy my boeuf bourguignon. It's a different experience for sure. There's pleasure to be had in taking the time for the mise en place and coming up with tweaks over time to micro-optimize the flavor, but is it really tastier?
One factor that makes the comparison more apt may be accounting for the price difference. I can cook at home for a fraction of the price, or spend just as much but use much better ingredients.
When I do eat out there is always something nice about not having to cook or clean up. That skews it a bit for me, maybe it wasn't actually as tasty as cooking at home but the whole experience is nicer (on occasion).
And the people who Uber Eats everything or go out for dinner are always the first to cry about cost of living or how prices in restaurants are so high. And then they cry that groceries are the same price.... ahah
Fwiw some of us still cook at home and go out rarely. It’s cheaper, tastier, healthier, and can be a pretty relaxing evening activity