Falling into the take-away trap, any advice?

miss_emmajane

I am currently a nursing student, and am very busy working long day shifts, but also just mentally drained from work so when I get home I feel like sitting down and not moving until the next day. I do have some meals in the freezer but not a variety, and when I get in I always just want to order a take-away so I don't have to cook. I know I need to stop the lazyness, I had cherrios last night as I thought at least I wasn't paying out.

Any advice on how I can try to get this sorted - I am not sure on the variety of foods I can freeze so only really have chilli con carni and also don't want to be eating lots of connivence foods (I know that makes little sense when I am eating take-aways anyway!) so we don't have many in aside from Quorn burgers

kitschkitty

What do you like to eat? maybe we can tell you if it's easy to cook and freezes well or not.

miss_emmajane

kitschkitty wrote: »

What do you like to eat? maybe we can tell you if it's easy to cook and freezes well or not.

I eat mostly veggie as I can be a bit funny with meat, but I like everything but fish really - love stews, chills, currys, cottage pies, pasta dishes ... really not fussy, just a bit frazzled by dinner time

meritaten

When you do cook do you just make one portion? a good tip is to buy some cheap foil containers and never make one portion of stew or curry - make four one for now and three for the freezer.! it doesn't cost four times as much - indeed, each meal works out cheaper. a nice compromise is to buy in some jars of sauce - do a stir fry adding your chosen sauce - spend a little time sitting down and preparing veg to keep in bags in the fridge - you can use the prepared veg for snacking, maybe one or two stir fries and the rest could go into the slow cooker for a casserole or made into soup.

unimaginative_user_name

I agree with batch cooking.

If you don't feel like cooking in the evening why not take something to heat up at work if youbhave access to a microwave. Then you could just have a sandwich when you get home.

lobbyludd

batch cooking is great, but I'd start off easy, the next time you have a day not in work/college pick something you know how to make (bolognaise/fish pie//cottage pie,etc they all freeze great) and make six portions, eat one freeze the rest (in portions) and give yourself permission to have ready meals the rest of the week. These don't have to be low nutritional value: get some fresh chilled soups in, frozen packet stir fries, all the supermarkets do meals with fresh ingrediants in plastic boxes that you just have to plonk in a pan and stir or put in the oven. these will be cheaper than takeaways and will get you in the habit of going to the microwave/hob rather than the phone

next week on your "day off" cook a different meal for freezing, have one, freeze the rest, next day have one of the portions you froze last week and soups/ready meals/scrambled egg on toast the rest of the week. keep building up until you have a variety of foods in portions and can start to plan a week's meals and up the batch cooking to say 2 or 3 days a week.

also - I'd start the cooking (bung in microwave/oven/on hob) as soon as I'd walked in the door and taken my coat off. If I have a rest/make a brew/whatever, I lose momentum and the rest of the evening is lost. If I start "doing" as soon as I walk in, I can get another 2/3 hours of mindless tasks done

CH27

Pasta is quick & easy.

Boil the pasta & stir some cream cheese, cooked garden peas & black pepper through it.

Boil pasta & sprinkle with grated parmesan & lemon juice.

GwylimT

Batch cook, virtually everything will freeze well when cooked, buy either foil trays or use plastic tubs, although as you have a lot of takeaways you may already have these. Then before you nip to work just take one out of the freezer so when you get home it just needs reheating, even if done in the oven probably takes about the same time to cook as it takes for a takeaway to arrive.

-taff

If you're going to batch cook, what you can do if it's your day off and you don't ant to spend all of it cooking, is either to cook in a slow cooker, or make a stew or curry that you can put on the cooker and leave for a few hours.

Stew, curry and bolognese sauce can all be left to cook away without much input.

Maitane

I'd add another vote for batch cooking here. Especially as you could do things like takeaway but freeze them. You could make a curry and then just serve it with that ready to nuke rice.

Idiophreak

We generally eat a selection of quick cook from scratch stuff that takes < 10 mins to cook:
Pasta, cream cheese and smoked salmon
Prawn stir fry
Chicken fajitas
Curry
Smoked mackerel + salad
Chicken tikka wraps
Gnocci, tomato sauce + cheese

Occasionally if we've time we'll make something that takes a little more effort.

Conversely, we sometimes have busy weeks when we struggle to find the time/energy to cook at all - then we get the M&S "fuller for longer" meals - really tasty and not too bad for you...we generally only get them when they're on offer though...certainly better for us than takeaway, anyway.