Dining Out

Last night was the first night in a long, long time that we had dinner at our kitchen table.  A dinner we cooked. Granted, we just cooked the rice and re-heated a lovely Tikka Masala we got at Costco, but it was still something we didn't order from a restaurant.
I'm ashamed to say that we havent' really done much cooking in the house in the last 9 months.  Yes, that's what I wrote, 9 months.  At least.  And there is really no excuse for it.  Oh, we had plenty of *reasons* not to cook at home.  We were too tired, Eric was working weird hours, I was taking classes, all the meat was frozen, we had no power for 6 days (that was a legitimate reason), the kitchen was a mess, the dining room table was completely buried.  On and on the reasons went.  What they all boiled down to was one thing: we were being LAZY.  We didn't want to come home and think of something to cook, prepare and cook it, clean off the table and lay down plates, and then clean everything all up and do it again the next night.  We didn't want to bother with thinking about what to do with all the food in the freezer and the pantry and the refrigerator.  We didn't want to dirty pots and pans and dishes only to need to wash them and dirty them the next day.
I am, of course, exagerrating slightly.  We have made a few meals here and there, we've tried to do better.  But we are slipping back into the "dining out every night" routing and it MUST stop.
Part of the reason is the money.  It's damn expensive to eat dinner out every night.  At a modest $20 a meal, that's $140 a WEEK we could be doing something better with.  Add in the fact that it's usually more like $30 a whack, and that's a car payment EVERY WEEK.
Part of the reason is our health.  My blood pressure is finally back down into the healthy range, 115/60.  Eric, on the other hand, is up around 138/90.  I finally got my numbers to drop by going cold turkey from fast food and soda for three months.  Eric has finally given up drinking Diet Coke.  Well, almost.  He's down to 1 20 oz bottle a day. He still eats fast food because he's on the road all the time and he doesn't have time to get a decent meal (or he thinks he doesn't have the time.)  We are both very overweight, with me in the Morbidly Obese category and Eric just nudging into Obese.  Mostly we both have these apple bellies, and most studies agree that's not good for people who have heart problems in the family.  Also not good for our backs.
Mostly the reason is that I don't really like not having control of the food that goes into my body.  I mean, I like having other people cook and clean up the mess, but I also like knowing what goes into what I'm eating.  Mostly I like to know that things I'm allergic to ARE NOT going into the food.
So I'm setting an intention that I will plan our dinners every week, using up the food we have in the house, and making healthy meals for us to have at dinner and take to work for lunches.