My mother used to preach to us, the importance of conserving energy. She said that you be able to save a lot of money if you just stayed at home and cooked. You would save money by not wasting it going out to restaurants all of the time. I was trying to find a way to save on my energy bills, because they were always so high. I never in my life, would have equated it to my cooking all of my gourmet meals at home every night. I thought I was saving us some money by cooking at home and not going out. I would have the pots and pans on top of the range, and the oven would be running, just to warm the plates most of the time. I sometimes had the roaster going, too. It suddenly dawned on me, how much heat I was putting into the kitchen, with all of the cooking I was doing. It seemed my air conditioning would be running constantly and during the summer, our energy bills were phenomenal. When we began eating out a couple times of weeks, our energy bills dropped down to a third of what they were. There was no way we were spending that much money by going to a bistro. We decided that we would just cook all through the winter. This would help to supplement our heating bills. In the summer, when we didn’t want to be home all of the time, we would eat out more. This saved our energy and saved on the air conditioning.