Buying Cooked Food Vs Preparing Home-cooked Meals

For several weeks, we would often buy cooked food for lunch and dinner, usually from a reliable carinderia in the town proper or from other tried and tested food-to-go stalls like Andok's, Baliwag or Chooks To Go, instead of prepare our meals at home.

I was trying to save time because I was so busy that I had to divide my time between serving at The Feast, earning a living, homeschooling Theo and doing other Mama duties.

At The Feast, the activity that really took a huge chunk of my schedule was our outreach program to Alternative Learning System (ALS) students. We held separate weekly feasts for two groups of ALS learners located at two different schools.

Last, February 24 2019, those students took their Accreditation and Equivalency Test (A&E Test), which was the culmination of their ALS program. This meant that after taking the A&E Test, they would no longer go to school to attend classes. It also meant that we would have to take a break from our weekly Feasts for ALS students until classes for the new batch start again.

This break gave me a much needed chance to review and revise our family's lifestyle.  One of the most important things I saw that needed a major change was our menu!

I decided we would go back to our traditional way of preparing home-cooked meals instead of buying from the carinderia.

So, last Thursday, February 28, I prepared a 1-week menu planner  and gave Papa Bong (our official market-goer) a list of items that he needed to buy at the market.

Note: Some of the dishes in that planner had been changed because Papa Bong forgot to buy some ingredients. Still, there was enough for the whole week, and some leftover fish and chicken that I can still make use of this week.

After a week of cooking meals again at home, let me share some of its advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:

• We are sure that we are eating clean and freshly cooked food.
• We can have generous servings of each dish, instead of the meager serving we get from the carinderia.
• We save on transportation expenses. Each instance of buying in the town proper would cost us an additional 50 pesos (more or less). If we buy at least once a day for 30 days, that's an additional 50.00 per day or an additional 1,500 pesos on the monthly budget . If we buy twice (separate trips for lunch and dinner) for 15 days, that's another 750.00 pesos, for a total of 2,250.00 pesos on added transportation expenses.
• I only need to think, plan and decide about the menu once a week, instead of doing it everyday or sometimes, even before every meal.
• We are able to eat at the right time.
• I feel fulfilled and happy to see that Theo and Papa Bong enjoy their meal.

Disadvantages:

• Cooking now eats up a lot of my time.
• My energy gets drained after cooking, especially now that summer seems to be setting in, which affects my work quite a lot.

Obviously, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages! I can easily sacrifice the time I spend for cooking because I know it is worth it. All I need to do is to adjust my schedule and my wake up time to fit all my tasks within the day.

As for the energy, let me share what happened this afternoon after I have finished cooking a not-so-easy-to-cook meal.

So, I felt I needed to lie down for a short while to rest. As I lay on the bed, I started thanking God for so many things. Most of all, I thanked Him for that specific moment when I got the chance to talk to Him and savor His presence. I thanked Him because the tiredness has made me focus my attention on Him in the midst of a busy day.

It was not actually a disadvantage after all.