How To Keep Eating In At Home Easy & Fun

Do your food challenges at home consist of boring meals and the temptation to eat out?

Eating out is expensive, especially when you have a family as big as ours.

Even though I’ve found many ways to save when we do eat out, it can still be one of those items that bust our budget if we’re not careful.

When you are trying to save money, spending it eating out is a habit you must stop!

Eating at home to save money became a priority.

So I’m going to share this eating at home challenge so you can get your family on board with eating at home!

Plus, when you’re eating at home to save money, you can find all kinds of things to do to entice your family to have fun while eating dinner.

And, I’ll share how to make eating at home fun so your family never gets bored of eating right at your own dinner table.

That’s when we started these food challenges at home as a way to keep our family eating in and saving money!

First, we started an “eat at home” challenge, which essentially forced us to eat at home for the month.

I can do anything for 39 days, and so can you. Just get ready and when the calendar flips to next month: YOUR CHALLENGE BEGINS.

Below you’ll find the exact food “challenges” that helped us to challenge ourselves to be creative and keep ourselves eating at home and saving money.

But how can you make eating at home fun? That’s the golden ticket!

To keep everyone entertained and eating at home for the month, I chose a family read-aloud book and read one chapter to everyone while we were eating dinner, then we’d talk about it.

They looked SO forward to that reading time.

And it was fun for me too. The trick was only to allow one chapter, which typically ended in a cliffhanger, so everyone would beg me to read “just one more”.

But to make it special, and for lack of time, I would only read one chapter a night.

And no, it is not something you can do out at a restaurant because of the hustle happening in a restaurant, and a server coming to your table, and no one can really hear you reading.

So it worked perfectly to keep it at home! 

Some of the books we’ve read during dinner are: Encyclopedia Brown (a young boy detective), By the Great Horn Spoon (about the gold rush),  any of the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys series books. I promise you everyone young (and old too!) will love this precious time during dinner. Only problem is that you won’t get to eat until after you’re done reading…

Kicking your eating out habit can not only be good for your wallet but also your health. Restaurants add extra salt and ingredients that you wouldn’t use at home, which can be bad for you.

Having the same old meals at the usual kitchen table can get a little boring after a while.

These food challenges at home are what you need to change and start to challenge yourself to make dinner fun again.

If you are dedicated to eating in for a whole month, that’s up to 31 meals you have to create to keep your family on board. You can start your own eating-at-home challenge with your family.

Here is how you can keep eating IN fun so you won’t even want to eat out.

Challenge #1: Try New (but not complicated) Recipes

New recipes are the first thing I do to help spice up a boring meal plan and to break in our food challenges at home.

If you are struggling to keep your family on board with eating in, try finding a new recipe.

You can try some of these easy dinner ideas to keep your meal plan fun and exciting.

Don’t bust your budget with expensive ingredients. Believe it or not, you can create new recipes out of what you already have in your pantry and break some of those food challenges at home.

Eating at home to save money doesn’t have to be expensive. There are tons of recipes out there that don’t have pricey ingredients.

This can be a fun way to get your family involved and make it a fun game: Have each person pick out a different food item, then get to the kitchen.

Or plug those ingredients into this awesome recipe tool and it will suggest a recipe for you.

Start your eating at home challenge with each person picking a new recipe to try out. You can put them all into a hat and pick one out each week. It will be a surprise meal and exciting to try out the new recipe.

Challenge #2: Don’t Make Dinners So Difficult

I know I am less tempted to eat out if I already have a meal plan in place that is filled with easy recipes.

Recipes that are too complicated make it hard to plan for and pricey to buy for.

Stick to meals that can be created quickly, easily, and don’t require too many ingredients. This will keep you from impulsively dining out so you can keep your food challenges at home going strong.

If you can make dinner in the time it takes to order a pizza, you’ll be less likely to order the pizza!

It usually takes up to an hour for the pizza delivery person to reach our house, and I know that there are tons of 30-minute meals or less you can find on Pinterest. Start your eating at home challenge with collecting easy recipes in under 30 minutes.

Plan ahead. Spend one day out of the week or month to make a menu with the family so there are no surprises.

Challenge #3: Make Your Favorite Restaurant Dishes… At Home!

With the internet and Pinterest, there is a copycat recipe out there for almost every single meal out you could desire.

From Olive Garden breadsticks to Panera soups, you can make all of your favorite meals right from the comfort of your own home.

Start your food challenges at home with your favorite diner meals!

That image above is my Copycat Chili’s Skillet Queso Dip Recipe! Mmmmmm!

Try to add a few copycat recipes to your meal plan so you can enjoy the same dishes you love when you eat out.

Maybe even have the kids be your server?! (They can write down your order on these free printable guest checks and you can even leave them a “tip” with this play money.)

Eating at home to save money can still be fun! Get your kids involved in what they might like to do.

Challenge #4: Keep Emergency Food On Hand

By emergency, I mean frozen, easy, and no big “cooking” on your part recipes. Another answer to breaking up the food challenges at home and making them doable.

This could be a frozen pizza, lean cuisine, frozen lasagna, or a freezer meal you made last week. It doesn’t matter what your go-to emergency meal is.

The point is that when you don’t feel like cooking, or you need something quick, you can whip something up for everyone without dining out.

If you have to cook every single night, you will burn out!

Stock your freezer with easy meals that you can pop in the oven while someone is setting the table. I keep a minimum of 6 pizzas in our freezer at all times. That way we have no excuse to order pizza when we are too tired to cook.

Keep these in your freezer for those moments when you need to play catch up, or it’s 8 pm, and you haven’t started dinner.

This eating at home challenge should give you some leeway as to how convenient you need your dinner to be. Don’t forget about canned soups as an easy and quick dinner also.

Challenge #5: Make Dinner Theme Nights

What is one of the most exciting parts of eating out? The atmosphere! The music! The decorations!

The atmosphere is what keeps guests feeling content and gives them something to look at when the conversation gets dull.

Mexican and Italian restaurants will usually have paintings of distant countries and landscapes on the walls, and some restaurants may even bring the decor right to the table.

Instead of just whipping up tacos for dinner, turn it into a fiesta to start your food challenges at home! Add some decor from around the house to the table, and even play some Mexican music.

This can turn a boring dinner into a fun, festive treat… and keep you from feeling like you are making another mundane meal for everyone!

Eating at home to save money can turn into a memorable dinner night. And isn’t that what we are trying to create? Memories!

Adding the atmosphere to your dinner is one way on how to make eating at home fun.

• Think of a luau with Hawaiian decorations and music.
• Or stick with a color-themed meal. Try to have all the colors of the rainbow or just one meal with one color.
• Have a backwards meal night where you eat dessert first and wear your clothes backwards.
• Create a Whodunnit Meal night? Where you play Clue!
• Pick a famous city and pick a meal to match. Then learn about the city during dinner.

Dish up a Movie & Dinner night! Put on a movie and pick a recipe to go with it.

• Like Disney’s Mulan and a Chinese meal.
• The movie Lady and The Tramp and spaghetti.
• Play the movie Ice Age and try this Acorn Squash Soup!
• Watching Winnie The Pooh? Try this Slow Cooker Honey Chicken recipe!
• Put in the movie Ratatouille and actually make Ratatouille!

Are you reading a book? Pick something out of the book that the characters were eating and make it for dinner.

• Like reading Treasure Island? Or watching Treasure Planet? Make these pirate treasure map quesadillas!
• Are you reading Charlotte’s Web? Make this Spider Worm Spaghetti!

Don’t think you need to eat every meal at home. Go on a picnic to the park. Take your meal to the beach or to the drive-in!

How to make eating at home fun is only limited to your imagination and creativity (or your googling skills)!

Challenge #6: Play Dinner Games

There are so many fun dinner games out there you can choose from to make dinner time more fun for your eating at home challenge.

Plus, you’ll get to know everyone even better!

Here’s a list of a bunch of fun dinner games you can play at the table to get you started!

Games can make mealtime more exciting, especially if these are something you only do at mealtimes!

Want another fun game to play while you are cooking? Play Iron Chef!

You can have each family member create an idea of a dinner dish with the ingredients at hand. Try to keep it simple to avoid making a mess at the table, but don’t forget to have some fun too.

Eating at home doesn’t have to feel like a chore or even a bore! If you make an eating at home challenge, it becomes more of a game to see how much money you can save!

If you follow these tips to keep your meals fun and easy, you’ll look forward to eating IN for every meal.

If you’re doing a spending freeze, you might not want to eat out again!

Don’t let routine keep you from sticking to your money-saving goals.

Keep dinners, breakfasts, and even lunch exciting so you’ll never need to go out.

So I hope you’ll join this eating at home challenge so you can get your family on board with eating at home!

Plus, when you’re eating at home to save money, you can find all kinds of things to do to entice your family to have fun while eating dinner.

And, with these how to make eating at home fun tips, your family will never get bored of eating right at your own dinner table.

Your Turn: What is your favorite meal to make at home? Do you make food challenges at home for your family? Tell us in the comments below!

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