The thought of eating out is enticing for so many reasons. It’s fun to get out of the house and into a new environment. It’s great to get out of cooking and cleaning. But really, it’s about the food! We long for something special, for something different, attractive and delicious. We want something wonderful, like what you see in the photo.

The dish in the photo is beautiful.  It’s well composed. There are lots of colors. The ingredients look fresh. I personally would be thrilled to have a server place this in front of me at a posh restaurant.

Well a server did place it in front of me, but I wasn’t at a posh restaurant. The server was my daughter, Kaye, who is seventeen and also the chef. One of Kaye’s chores is to make dinner for Jeff and me on Sunday evenings. It seems only fair, since we make dinner for her the other six days of the week. Kaye has been cooking, mostly with Dad, for years and has become quite accomplished. Since Kaye, like most seventeen year-olds, isn’t much of a planner, everything in the meal was something that we happened to have on hand when she started thinking about dinner at 4:00 pm.

This dinner includes shrimp, which you see on top, bell peppers, onions, mushrooms and spinach over quinoa and topped with pine nuts. The shrimp was tossed in Jeff’s pesto, which was left over from a dinner earlier in the week, and is made out of cilantro, olive oil, garlic, and lime juice. The most expensive part of the meal was the shrimp, followed by the mushrooms. Overall, to feed all three of us, it cost about $23, or $7.69 each.  It would cost nearly that much just to add shrimp to a dish at a typical restaurant.  For example, at Red Lobster, to add a skewer of garlic shrimp to your meal, it costs $5.49 extra.

Now, I did have to clean up, and the room was just our dining room. But the company was great, and I didn’t have to fight traffic, look for parking or wait for a table. Home cooking doesn’t have to be boring or difficult (especially if you have your kids do it). You can have a fabulous meal for a fraction of the cost of eating out.