To ask if you view food such as takeaways as a waste of money

[Blameitonme7000]

I personally don’t but I know many do

@notacooldad

Having just spent £40 on a very mediocre Chinese takeaway for two, yes! Christmas in a bike, i would expect paying £40 to feed 7!!

Perhaps we are just greedy. This is what we got for our £40 (or £41.40, to be exact, not including delivery).

I do but still order once/twice a week 😂

To be fair I shouldn't have bought the sweet and sour sauce (don't know what i was thinking) so really we only consumed £38 worth of food.

Having both the skill and ingredients to hand to cook good Japanese/Chinese/Korean food, I'd rather do it myself.

However, I don't have a tandoor or wood-fired oven to hand, so yeah, I order in a good curry or pizza when I feel like it and don't feel bad about it.

LostInABlizzard - I don’t think you are greedy, I think your chow mein and cashew dish are both over priced. What I noticed last night is that our curry house had different prices on deliveroo compared to just eat. Quite drastically different too!

I used to love a Friday night curry from the takeaway but when I got a Christmas card from them I thought I was maybe ordering too often
I can cook now and pretty much prefer home cooked food but do still love the occasional curry as a treat.
Since WFH I've found out that my neighbours get takeout nearly every day for lunch and dinner. I couldn't afford to do that but if I could when I was their age I would - much better than a jar of pasta sauce which was about my limit then!

We're maybe once a fortnight. If it's an Indian I get a starter, main, rice and a bread. Always have enough for my dinner the following night. DH doesn't get as much as that so no left overs for him. I love having enough for two nights so feel like I've got my money's worth.

So expensive and a rip off but I love an occasional takeaway

@littlepattilou I was thinking same thing! Mains here are £8.95, no way would i get away with spending less than £45 for the three of us (especially with a teenage boy)!
We have them two or three times a month, ranging from Domino's to something a bit more fancy.
My husband and I used to get a Chinese every Friday, then tried to cut it out in a cost saving measure...but we were both too tired to cook so it was like our 'date night' treat.
I don't like getting something i could cook easily myself, but an Indian or Thai meal is a nice change.

So I checked our local Chinese and the cashew dish is £8 and the chow mein is £6.

We are in London.

SisterAgatha I guess that's one problem with being an infrequent consumer of takeaways… I don't know how much things ought to cost.
I can't remember the last time I ordered Chinese food. Some years ago anyway.

To be fair there were a lot of cashews in it. (And diced cucumber, oddly!)

Remember of course tho that the cleanliness rating and popularity do affect cost. Maybe our Chinese has a 2/5 cleanliness and yours has a 5/5. I know our curry place has a 5/5 so we don’t mind paying more. So much affects the price and if you enjoyed it, who cares x

It is so much cheaper and healthier to cook at home. My partner is great at cooking traditional meals (e.g. cottage pie with steamed veg), so I've successfully experimented with Indian, Thai, Chinese and Mexican.

We cannot batter and deep fry fish, so once a month buy that and a family deal with four medium fish is only £20.

Chow mein £5.40 near me
Chicken and cashew £5.30

Local Indian does a set meal for 1 which feeds me for 2 meals, you get a lot!

If you enjoy it & you can afford it without leaving you short then its not a waste of money. That said whenever I do get take away, probably once every couple of months. I'm always left feeling I can make much tastier food at home.

This is one I plan to try soon. Great reviews, veggie food and this is £9

Massive waste of money and always a disappointment.

DP and I are both decent cooks and we usually take it in turns to do dinner. If neither of us can be arsed we’ll do a freezer meal (pizza etc), or buy a naice microwave curry from somewhere like M&S.

I resent the expense, waiting time, plastic waste (delivery cartons, sauce pots etc), and mediocrity of no-longer-hot-or-fresh-by-the-time-you-get-it takeaway food.

A meal in a restaurant is a lovely occasional treat in normal times, but we always pick something we couldn’t make ourselves like sushi, Vietnamese, Ethiopian etc.

The quality and variety of the food scene is the one and only thing I truly miss about London.

Not really-I cant replicate the way they taste at home and have more cash than time -I buy takeaway 3 night a week.

We have fish and chips once a week, my autistic, food-fussy teen loves it and it's a real pleasure to feed him something he likes with no fuss and worry from my side. We eat in the living room watching telly and it's one of the few communal things we do now that he's entered his Kevin & Perry phase, it's worth every penny.

DH and I probably have one other takeaway/heat at home type thing once a week on top of that, but that's a lockdown thing really - we would normally have eaten out at least once a week. I cook and meal plan and there are 21 meals a bloody week eaten in my home at the moment - I don't think it's a disaster if 2 of them come from somewhere else than my kitchen.

This is our bargain, it feeds 5 easily plus if you phone and pay via cash you get a bottle of fizz, a portion of chips, prawn crackers and extra spring rolls thrown in because it's A spend of 25

I think it depends a lot on what's available. I've had takeaways where they've been a massive waste of money and takeaways where they're not.

I get delivery a lot now. It's probably relevant that I live overseas in a v compact city and supermarket food here is pretty expensive - you'd be hard pressed to buy and make a meal for what you'd pay to get it delivered, ready made. You can't buy ready meals. Also, because a lot of people have tiny kitchens (single people basically don't cook), the volumes in takeout/delivery are very high so the prices are better for what you get and everywhere is set up for it.

I confess now I pay the monthly flat rate for Deliveroo as if you get more than 4 orders it works out cheaper and I'm probably on about 10-12.

Things I particularly think are worth ordering

• pizza (I have a stone for homemade but still not as good- it was more a lockdown "activity" for the kids)
• Peking duck and pancakes
• poke bowls
• wraps and soup meal deal if I'm wfh (lazy but somehow they're nicer)
• curries

Generally, yes. I don’t enjoy it at all. Every once in a while, with 2 full time jobs and family stuff going on, it just takes a little time and mental capacity pressure off.

In lockdown, the odd pizza delivery injected a much needed burst of excitement for my kids and was worth every penny.

[quote moochingtothepub]@littlepattilou

Where do you live??? Never heard of such cheap takeaways, mains are £6 minimum here and rice £4 per portion [/quote]
I was thinking the same . We tend to use the supermarket takeaway foods - Chinese , Indian etc as so much cheaper .Our local Indian is at least 24 pounds for 2 mains , 1 rice and 1 nan. It certainly wouldn't do us two nights either . I can afford it but think it is a waste of money .

I bloody love takeaways, and if I was richer I'd get them a lot more than I do now, which is extremely infrequently.

I hate cooking. I love food. I have an entirely inadequate kitchen.