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The mid-morning More meeting has crumbled my resolve. There was a smattering of talk about junky food, the kind you get at a coffee shop and a street cart. The kind of food I am avowedly avoiding. I sat down at my desk and tweeted this: “@more_ca: Just got out of a @more_ca meeting, and all I can think about is takeout food (hot dogs, donuts) despite my ‘eating-in’ challenge.”

Then I begrudgingly ate a healthy whole-grain bread and spiced-cheese sandwich that I had brought from home. Even hot mustard and a dollop of full-fat mayo didn’t do the trick. All I could think was “No really, I wish this were something from the food court.”

Up until today, I had been cruising along, but I’ve discovered all it takes is the mention of a forbidden food and one really meh brown-bag lunch to make this whole eating-in challenge lose its lustre entirely.

Anyhow, so far I haven’t eaten out and tomorrow will be two weeks, so I plan to celebrate with spicy butter chicken from my local Indian resto. I would be sorely tempted to eat out tonight instead, but luckily I already have a meal half-made in the fridge.

I’ve enjoyed this challenge (until today!) and I think I’ll do it again sometime soon. It could be interesting to do it once per season, right? What are your thoughts on the matter? Over on Twitter, I had lots of encouragement and retweets egging me on these past two weeks.

Related posts:
Do we eat out too much?
Not eating out: One week down, one to go

-Helen

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This week, I am bewitched by a book I found in a friend’s giveaway pile called The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove by Cathy Erway, in which a young New Yorker eschews eating out in favour of making every meal in her tiny kitchen for two years.

Two years?! I can’t even go two weeks without eating out. Friday is spicy butter chicken night, with fluffy basmati rice and the most gorgeous airy naan I have ever placed on my tastebuds. On Tuesday or Wednesday, we’ll eat gloriously sticky ribs or a tender brisket sandwich from a hopping new BBQ place down the street from me. Over the weekend I usually get thick Thai pad sew noodles, and I’m not too picky where they come from either.

A decade ago, ironically with an inferior kitchen and shoddier knife skills, I cooked far more than I do now. I had weekly dinner parties with lots of cheap wine and pasta. Yet eventually it started to feel like drudgery, my workday grew ever longer, and I moved to a neighbourhood full of restaurants and takeout joints. A perfect recipe for eating out three times a week was thus created. But now that I’m back at the gym, it seems fitting I should try and cut down on these salty, fat-laden (but delicious) delights, right? So here I go. I’m going to see if I can cook-in, like Cathy Erway, for two weeks.

My question for all of you out there is, do you feel like you eat out too often?

And I’ll leave you with this recipe, which has been something of a surprise hit on More.ca:
Citrus Chickpea Salad with Parsley

Happy weekend!
-Helen