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It's mostly start-up costs. Admittedly, the start-up costs are high; we got 'lucky' in that wife wasn't allowed to work for a while during the immigration process, so she bore a lot of those costs while unemployed. We kept a spreadsheet of recipes; I usually did the calorie counts. But once you have the recipe and have done the calorie count once, it's done forever. (You also don't have to do this right away if it's not an important goal; you can always just go do it later, since you have all the information just sitting there anyway.)
Actual cooking time can really vary. We have a mix, with some recipes that are pretty quick and easy to make; honestly, many of these take less time than I would have taken to go out of my way, fight through traffic that always seems to get worse, stop by a drive-thru, wait through what always seemed to be a longer and longer line, and then still have to wait for it to be prepped. Just a burger and fries? Easy peasy, honestly takes almost no time. Maybe 15-20min of cook time for the fries, and you do the burger while they cook. Even faster if you're just microwaving a baked potato. There's a ton of really simple meals, like throwing together a salad or making some spaghetti (purchased frozen meatballs are an easy starter), and legit, I'm probably saving time over running to a drive thru.
Up to this point, you don't even need much "meal prep"; you just need meal planning, so that you can pick up all your groceries for the week in one stop rather than having to constantly run out to the store to get that one thing you're missing.
Getting more into meal prep, with a little time and effort, you can start freezing things to have some 'ready made' stuff that just needs reheating for days when you have no time. We'll have more extravagant recipes that we'll make on some weekend that we're going to be home anyway (winter is fantastic, especially because the cooking keeps the house warm), and we'll just make a double/triple/whatever batch (depending on calorie counts and how many portions we're wanting), bag it up, freeze it, and bam, we've got ten meals that we can just pull out and reheat over the next few months. Family size matters for what is plausible. If you're not a big family, you can bang out twenty days worth (or more) of lunches/dinners in a long afternoon. A freezer helps, so you don't have to eat the same thing every day for a week, which is what a lot of meal preppers do. But we'll also sometimes do, say, a casserole or roast or chicken that we'll just eat for three days in a row or whatever. That maybe takes more time than if you're stopping by Chipotle and buying enough food once to have it sit in your fridge and eat on for three days... but probably less than stopping by Chiptole every day and buying individual meals each day.
Now, once a week, one of us goes through the recipes and picks some for the following week. Can take into account if we know we have some work thing or whatever and put something super easy on those days. Then, since the actual recipes are right there, make a grocery list. That whole process maybe takes 20min now, tops. We often do it between sets while we're at the gym, so it doesn't even take up what would otherwise be productive time. I spend wayyyy more time writing stupid comments on TheMotte than I do on almost any of this.
Costs are a big question mark; it really depends on what you want. We've definitely culled some recipes that were good and tasty, but not so good and tasty that they justified the cost. If you want everything artisanal and fancy, sure, you can rack up the dollar signs. But when you're making it yourself, you really can tailor it to what you want, and for an equivalent quality, you're almost always saving (or for equivalent cost, you're almost always getting better quality). I will absolutely put a cheap American cheese slice on my homemade double cheesey until the day they ban it; nothing else melts quite like it; fight me.
It definitely changes your relationship with restaurants, though. So many times, when we do end up in a restaurant, there's like half the menu that would just pain me to order, thinking, "MFer, I can put Alfredo sauce on some pasta for like a buck o' five; why would I pay you fifteen for it?!" Restaurants now are mostly for being social, when traveling, for an experience, for some international dishes that are kind of a pain to get/keep the ingredients, or for some dishes that genuinely do have a significantly higher home prep cost/difficulty (I may or may not be finally close to cracking sushi well enough; this was always one of our few 'always worth just picking some up' meals).
Since I feel like I need a closer, I will just remind you that the start-up costs are absolutely high, and you will probably feel very very frustrated for a while. But like with most things in life (exercising, taking up a new sport/hobby, buying a house for the first time, hell, being married, etc.), it does get easier. You can try to ease into it, too; don't feel like you need a brand new recipe and make every meal yourself every day for three months; just plan to substitute some number of meals a week to start and hopefully be fine with repeating some things as you're building a repertoire. One last thing that also helped my wife is that I always assured her that if something went horribly wrong with a new recipe, we can always just go pick something up/order something in/pull out a frozen pizza or something; it's not the end of the world. Thankfully, we only had to do that a handful of times.
As an aside, any chance of posting some of those recipes in the Wednesday thread? I'm beginning to get heavy into meal prep, and could use the inspiration.
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