The Challenge: 30 Days of Restaurant-Free Living

In January 2010, we embarked upon our first Restaurant-Free Month (RFM). The idea was simple: to combat the financial and nutritional excesses of the holidays, we'd stay in the entire month of January, cooking every meal at home.

Jim and I love to eat, and we love to cook. We took RFM as a chance to replicate some dishes from our favorite restaurants and to create some elaborate meals of our own design. I cheated twice at lunch (someone else was buying), but overall we stuck to the plan and ate very, very well.

Perhaps too well. While the foods we cooked were healthier than what we'd get in a restaurant, they weren't much cheaper. We tried RFM again in August (following the financial and nutritional excesses of our July wedding and honeymoon), and the results were the same: delicious, but not substantially less expensive than eating out once or twice a week.

So this time around, we'll be making an effort to cook great meals and save more money. And because so many people ask about our recipes and our process, we decided to start this blog to document our adventures in restaurant-free living.

Hope you enjoy.