Cook for Good if you want to save money by cooking and eating delicious, seasonal food from scratch. You'll make a positive difference, too: for your health, your family, and for your community and planet.
Eat well on an average of just $1.12 cents a meal for the thrifty plan and only $1.89 for the "green" plan which uses mostly organic or sustainably raised ingredients (prices from January 2010 using the winter menu). The cart cost for the thrifty ingredients comes out to just $1.26 a meal, 73 cents less per meal than the food-stamp allowance in North Carolina. The cart cost shows how much you'd actually have to spend at the grocery store buying everything on the shopping lists, even though you will have some ingredients left over, such as part of a bottle of oil. Even the cart cost for the green ingredients averages just $2.09 per meal, only a dime more than the food-stamp allowance in the dead of winter!
How Does it Work?
Take ten minutes a week and make a pot of beans (see video at right) and you've started to Cook for Good. Take an hour and make that pot of beans, plus yogurt, pudding, and pasta sauce and you are well on your way.
Better yet, go the whole route.
Go to the grocery store and farmers' market one morning.
That evening, soak two kinds of beans and mix up yogurt, pudding or ice cream, bread dough, and pizza dough ... all in about an hour and a half. Have some warm pudding or home-made ice cream as your reward.
The next day, cook the beans, make two kinds of pasta sauce plus pizza sauce, cookies or cake, salad, two loaves of bread, and pizza, plus a few baked potatoes or roasted vegetables to make best use of the oven. Do all this in about three and a half hours.
Most of your cooking is now done for the week.
After a few weeks, you'll be able to stock up a week's worth of prepared food in the freezer in case of visitors, illness, emergencies, time crunches ... or just a chance to have fun. You don't want to miss a chance to go to a concert because you have to cook!
Buy any of the Cook for Good ebooks and start saving money, eating well, and making a difference today! One gives you the basics to do the whole program and the other two give you even more recipes plus menus, shopping lists, and a cooking plan for spring and summer. Learn how to make the best use of your time in the kitchen. All three ebooks include many recipes not available online.
The Seven Lively Savings
Once you start to Cook for Good, you'll gain benefits that I think of as the Seven Lively Savings:
Save money – Eat well on an average of $1.12 a meal for the regular plan and only $1.89 for the "green" plan which uses mostly organic or sustainably raised ingredients. Save hundreds of dollars or even thousands of dollars a year compared to the USDA's food plans. And by eating such a healthy diet, you'll save money on medical costs too.
Save time – Cook for Good in about the same amount of time as you'd spend eating out and less time than with typical, loosely planned cooking (at least the way I used to cook). Reuse pots several times in one cooking session to cut down on washing dishes. And cooking in batches means that you cook once and clean once but eat several times.
Save your mind – Get rid of the daily stress of “what’s for dinner?” Eating less sugar and processed foods will make you and your kids less jumpy. Saving money now and learning how to cook on a very low budget will give you confidence in tough times.
Save your family – Create good memories for your kids by filling your home with the delicious smells of baking and cooking. Give them a chance to talk with you while you cook. (It’s easier to have a heart-to-heart talk at home than at McBurger.) And let them help! Even young children can scrub potatoes. Teens can take over making bread or yogurt. You'll be teaching them skills to help them when they have their own kitchens.
Save your community – Have enough food to join celebrations and bring comfort to your family, friends, and neighbors. Support your local farmers so that good food is produced near you.
Save the planet – Cut back on your use of oil by cutting back on the transportation costs of your food, the amount of meat you eat, and packaging you buy. You'll help slow global warming and reduce the suffering of animals too. Buy organic or sustainably-raised food when you can to reduce pollution and support good farming practices.
Savor your food – The meals are simply delicious. Enjoy!
Cook for Good and Lose Weight!
The first question most people ask me about the Cook for Good plan is, "Did you lose weight?"
Yes – and it just happened. We weren't hungry, but just found ourselves gradually losing weight. My husband and I both lost about a pound a week. Maybe it was because we weren't eating any transfats, high-fructose corn syrup, or artificial sweeteners. Maybe it was because the whole grains, fruits, and vegetables were so satisfying. And maybe it was because having a small piece of one-layer cake or just two cookies became enough for dessert.
Cook for Good and Save Time!
The second question most people ask is "Where did you find the time?"
When I tell them that you can Cook for Good in less than 25 minutes minutes a meal that serves four people, or about six minutes per person, they ask where they can get my book. That time includes the whole time spent preparing meals: shopping, driving, cooking, and washing dishes. Here's a rough comparison to eating unplanned meals and eating breakfast and snacks at home but eating two meals out. Of course, eating out will take less time if you always go to the same fast-food place next to your office and will take much more time if you go to fancy restaurants across town.
So you can save about 9 hours a month using the time-saving Cook for Good method and save over a thousand dollars a year on home-cooked food. Or you can save a few minutes a month compared to eating out two meals a day and save many more thousands of dollars a year.
And this comparison doesn't tell the whole story, since many of the activities in the Cook for Good plan are shared, while typical cooking and eating out may require time from each family member. For example, I shop and cook for both of us and my husband washed dishes for both of us (I can hear him doing it right now as I type this: truly music to my ears). If your kids are old enough, they can help too.
On the other hand, for typical meals, each person might stop by the store on the way home and then decide what to rustle up to cook. Eating out is even worse: all the family members stand in line, make choices from the menu, wait to be served, and spend time going to and from the restaurant. If you are apart because of work or school for lunch (or even dinner), then you may be burning time and gas to go to two, three, or even more separate restaurants instead of eating a meal you brought from home.
