One of the fun parts about reading and writing about personal finance and money all day is that you run into a lot of good advice and a lot of bad advice. Over the years, I’m amazed at how much of both is repeated with great regularity.

Whereas some bad advice hurts no one, a lot of money myths are costing some people money (and helping others make a lot more than they should!). So today I’ll be hitting five popular myths that span your entire life, from spices to gasoline, with the hope that it spurs a discussion that helps us all understand why these myths are wrong and why they’re costing us money.

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We’ve had a slow cooker in our kitchen repertoire for several years now and in that time we’ve made fewer than a dozen dishes in it. For those keeping score at home, that’s about one every three or four months. The reason we don’t use it as much as we probably could has to do with our lack of creativity in the slow cooking department. Our cooking is very much dominated by our ideas. We think of things we enjoy and we try to make them, or dishes similar to them, which leads us to a lot of stews, which take just as long to cook, but never to stews in a slow cooker. I chalk it up to having not grown up with a slow cooker (it’s not prominent in Chinese cuisine) but the reality is I’ve had no inspiration, since I love plenty of things I didn’t grow up eating.

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This year, we’ve decided to grow a bunch of herbs we enjoy on a regular basis because buying them in the store costs way too much and they lack the flavor of fresh herbs. Our basil, thyme, dill, mint and oregano are all growing like crazy in planters on our deck. If you’ve ever grown herbs, you know that you end up with far more than you could possibly use.

Herbs get their flavor from their oils. This is why you can get a good whiff of an herb’s flavor by rubbing your hands on the leaves and smelling them afterwards (much easier than trying to smell the leaves directly – that gem of a tip comes from my cousins Jonathan and Kate). This is why air drying herbs late in the summer is the best way to maintain flavor.

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For health and financial reasons, my wife and I have been cooking more of our meals at home. We started because we thought it would be fun, and it certainly has been a wonderful adventure, and with the economy recovering, we see this as something we’ll stick with even after things get back to “normal.” While we still go out to eat every once and a while, we’ve learned that cooking is a skill everyone should develop and nurture.

Reasons You Should Cook More

Before we get into the how, let’s talk a little about the why. You don’t need scientific studies to tell you that it’s much healthier to eat a home cooked meal and it’s far cheaper too. Restaurant food is designed to taste great, not make your body feel great. It’s chock full of fat, sodium, and other ingredients that taste wonderful but can wreak havoc on your body over long periods of time. Portion control is also non-existent as plate sizes are huge and portions of generous to make you feel like you’re getting the most out of your dining dollar.

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Last weekend, my lovely wife had a few of her classmates over for dinner and a movie. For dinner, we made homemade dumplings from “scratch,” except for the skins which were store bought. We must have made close to two hundred dumplings, evenly split between a shrimp and pork filling and a pork and cabbage filling. After a quick 12 minute steaming, a little crisp frying in some sesame oil, we enjoyed the dumplings with some wine.

We made as many dumplings as we had store-bought dumpling wrappers (or are they called skins?) and we still had filling left over, about a cup and a half worth of each. Since raw shrimp and raw pork don’t last very long in the fridge, we needed to make up the rest of the dumplings quickly and pop them in the freezer.

So last night, after an afternoon of football games, I found myself at home with no skins… so I thought I’d try to make skins from scratch.

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As I mentioned last week, my lovely wife and I have started cooking more because it’s fun, healthier, and easier on the wallet. We’ve documented some of our creations on Bargaineering, from pork and shrimp dumplings to pizza to to homemade apple pie. We’ve even gone super high class and cooked up a Provençal rack of lamb earlier this year.

How do we pick what we want to cook? It’s a mixture of what’s on sale that week at our local grocery store and the meals we absolutely love. We both loved dumplings so we thought it would be fun to make our own filling and “make” dumplings. My wife always had homemade apple pie on the first day of school and so I made her a pie when she started her new graduate program.

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While most of us don’t believe we’re out of the recession, no matter what the statistics say, we can all agree that we made a few sacrifices over the last year and a half. Some have made a lot of sacrifices. One of the things my wife and I cut back on was dining out. We would go out to restaurants several times a week, not counting weekend festivities with our friends. For a dual income, no kid household, it’s not uncommon because our other expenses are generally low. However, with the uncertainty of the recession and my wife starting a PhD program, we thought that cutting back on one of our largest expenses was a smart idea and we believe the changes will stick even after the economy truly recovers.

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My wife and I have been trying to cook more of our meals at home, rather than going out to a restaurant. Part of it is frugality, cooking at home is simply cheaper than eating out. However, an even bigger part has to do with being healthier. Restaurants tend to use way too much oil, fat, cheese, and salt (among other things) and eating out all the time can expand your waistline as quickly as it thins out your wallet. So when I was offered a copy of The Frugal Foodie Cookbook by Lara Starr and Lynette Shirk to review, I was eager to see a cookbook that had frugality, rather than a particular cooking style or cuisine, in mind.

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My wife told me that when she was a child, her mom would make her homemade apple pie on the first day of school. Now I, being the awesomest husband in the world, remembered this and decided I’d surprise her after her first day of grad school. I thought it was going to be harder but it turns out making homemade apple pie is remarkably simple. From start to finish, it took this pie novice less than an hour to make (minus the crust, which I cheated on).

(that photo is of the actual homemade apple pie I made, you can tell it’s homemade because of the smile! )

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If you’ve ever eaten at any Chinese restaurant or take out joint, chances are you’ve ordered something that’s been in a brown sauce or a white sauce. Chicken with broccoli? That’s a brown sauce. Seafood with vegetables? That’s a white sauce.

If you enjoy those types of flavors, might I recommend giving them a try at home? They’re really easy and really tasty. The hard part is finding the ingredients and preparing them!

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