When only takeaway will do?

krlyr

The Takeaway Secrets book may be worth a look at - it's recipes on how to make your own 'fakeaways' at home. The recipes aren't particularly complicated - even the curries are broken down into stages, as you make the base first (and can freeze the excess), which you then use in the individual curry recipes.

Having a chest freezer is a huge help to us - I batch cook which makes it much easier when we're tired and hungry. Bolognese is a mere 10 minutes of boiling spaghetti away, with the meat needing a few minutes of pinging in the microwave. Sausage and mash - 25 minutes for the frozen sausages, 5 minutes for the homemade mash frozen in takeaway tubs in 2-person portions. Freezing things in 'building blocks' really helps too - if we're sick of spaghetti, we might have the bolognese on pasta, with rice, on a jacket potato and so on. The mash could go with the sausages, or it could go with lamb chops, chicken casserole (can be batch cooked and frozen, too), etc.

There's lots of websites on batch cooking, and lots of threads too. You don't have to start off too complex - if making your own bolognese sauce seems too daunting, start off with jars. A jar of Dolmio on offer at £1 or so is a lot cheaper than a takeaway!

tiger_eyes

Proper planning prevents poor performance. When you're starving late in the evening and don't want to cook, you need to be able to pull out your nice homemade dinners from the freezer, the ones you prepared at the weekend. I made about 8-10 portions of chicken korma this weekend. My freezer is absolutely stuffed. It tastes amazing and it's ready to eat in under 5 minutes.

edinburghlad

I feel your pain 13000. I used to be the very same, come home from work and order a take away. Any excuse really.
1. Too tired to cook
2. Too late to cook
3. It will take to long to cook ect

I'm not saying it will be easy, cause trust me it isn't. The temptation will still be there. The one thing I have found that works for me is cooking a 2/3 different dishes on a day off and freezing them into portions. I then set out a meal plan for the week and take my dinner out the freezer in the morning. This then gives me no excuse to order a take away if all I need to do is put it in the micro. :-)

System

Batch cooking and slow cookers worked for us when I worked full time. I still keep this up, as I am self employed and work comes in at random times, also I have poor health so now if I get unwell I have something easy in the freezer at all times.