When a restaurant meal sounds too expensive, but you still want to have a restaurant-type celebration . . .

Our quasi-frugal birthday celebration this past weekend

This past weekend, we celebrated both my husband's and my birthdays. Our birthdays are 6 days apart. Now that everyone's schedules so much more complicated, we just lump the two birthdays together for celebrating. 

Last month, we began talking about eating in a restaurant to celebrate. In case you hadn't guessed by now, dining out is exceedingly rare for us. Anyway, we talked about which restaurants all 6 of us might enjoy. We have a favorite, locally-owned Greek place that we all enjoy. I went online to check their menu prices, and man oh man, has there ever been some inflation. I knew I wouldn't enjoy the meal if I was thinking about the final bill the whole time. 

After about an hour of brainstorming with my family, we decided to just do a Greek meal at home. However, I didn't want to be the one cooking, and I didn't want my daughters to be saddled with a lot of unfamiliar and time-consuming cooking. That's when I thought to check the website for our local restaurant supply. Between the restaurant supply and WinCo we could pick up everything we'd need to put together gyro sandwiches, a tossed salad, fried mushrooms, and baklava for 6 of us with minimal effort (my daughters put it all together) and for less than half of what a comparable meal would have cost at the little Greek kafé near us. As a bonus, we had a bunch of leftovers, notably the seasoned gyro meat. 

This is what we bought:

5-lb box frozen cooked and seasoned gyro meat

6 ct pita bread

10-oz tzatziki sauce

large head Romaine lettuce

3 Roma tomatoes

1 red onion

12 ct frozen baklava

1 box frozen breaded and fried mushrooms

Everything was delicious. And my daughters were even able to push a birthday candle into my and my husband's baklava. So no "wishes" were lost by not having cake. And as I mentioned, we have a lot of the flavorful meat slices left in the freezer. Our Friday pizza nights just became Friday gyro nights (until the gyro meat is gone, that is).

One of the shocking discoveries I've had shopping in a restaurant supply store is how much pre-prepped items they sell. My guess is that many restaurants are using these items to speed up production and shave costs on kitchen help. This makes a lot of sense. For example with our Greek dinner, I can't imagine how involved it would have been to actually make baklava from scratch or the amount of time saved with the meat, all seasoned, cooked, and sliced for us. Knowing this, when my family next wants a restaurant style meal for a celebration, we can buy some ready-to-assemble ingredients from the restaurant supply, and put in a little effort on our part, to save about 50% the cost of a comparable meal out and not suffer any taste or quality.

Not as cheap as a scratch-cooked meal, but much more enjoyable for the cooks and without the high price tag of a restaurant.