16
votes
How often do cook/order out/ eat pre-made food/ throw together food
For cooking I mean like making it largely from scratch. Eating out (or dining in) is hopefully self-explanatory. By premade meals I mean like ramen bowls, cans of soup, Stoufers or Banquet meals, frozen pizzas, etc. Throwing something together is like a sandwich, cereal, a box of Mac and cheese/ hamburger helper or a ramen packet where you add a boiled egg, leftover pork and some chives, etc-- stuff where it's mostly finished food that just requires a little bit of work.
We have a blended family with 4 teenagers (2 are hers, 2 are mine) so our only real choice is to cook almost every night. Once a week we have a 'fend for yourself" style left over night. Some nights are harder than others because we may have a late sports night or every now and then it is a chore to cook so we may throw something "easy" together (pancakes and eggs/breakfast for dinner, sammiches, etc)
Maybe once every other week we'll get a pizza special since that is still an affordable way to feed a mass of people on the cheap.
It is simply too outrageous for us all to try and go out anymore. Just this weekend her and I went to the Subway by our house and it was $32 for 2 basic footlong subway clubs, drinks and chips--no double meat, no premium subs or anything. That would have been just shy of $100 if we had all been there.. A fucking hundred dollars for Subway?! No thanks.
Mostly cooking from scratch. Me and my wife like to eat healthy. We have our own allotment with a veggie garden, where we grow lots of our own food (potatoes, onion, courgettes, carrots, tomatoes, beans, etc). What we cannot eat in the season, we store (either by freezing or pickling).
We usually cook for multiple days, so some days it is merely heating up the food in the microwave. Not sure how that classifies.
We used to have take-away once a week, but it is getting more expensive, the food quality is not great in our area and overall, it is unhealthy.
I'm trying to force myself to cook more, but honestly I eat out a lot. I live alone so often making stuff from scratch is kind of a waste because I'm the only one eating it, and leftovers aren't something I'm big on. My folks never showed me how to cook (or do much of anything, really) and I never felt the desire to learn as an adult. Digestive problems run in my family so food feels more like an inconvenience than something enjoyable.
Anyone who cooks but doesn’t have a dishwasher ? Shit has me miserable with how much time and effort it takes just to feed myself, but everything is too expensive not to eat at home these days.
Back when I lived alone and without a dishwasher I would make a lot of 1 pot foods. Clean up as you prep and are waiting for it to cook, it makes you much happier when you've finished your meal and you just have a plate/bowl, spoon/fork and a pot/frying pan left to clean. Also when I was being a real degen I would use disposable plates/bowls, I got cardboard without plastic covering so it could just go right into the compost.
If you can afford it an instant pot like device with slow cooking/pressure cooking/sauteing all-in-one makes this super simple.
Our dishwasher broke, like, three weeks after we moved in.
My wife loves to cook BIG, with lots of tomatoes & cheeses.
I do dishes basically non-stop. I barely have fingerprints, they've been scoured off lol.
Shit is indeed miserable.
Yup, that’s def the strat. You know, you don’t do a great job of living up to your name. 😄
Gonna answer myself just to get the ball rolling but-
I'd say about 60% of my meals are cooked, 30% is thrown together food, 8% is eating out and 2% is premade food. I mostly enjoy cooking but when I'm feeling lazy (which is fairly common) I'll just have like a bowl of cereal, sandwiches or some upscaled ramen. I usually eat out once a week (on rare occasions twice) and I almost never get premade meals.
What do you consider "thrown together food" in your example?
Is that something like making a sandwich because the bread was purchased, the cheese was purchased, the vegetables were purchased, and then you add some sort of protein to it, all of which was purchased in large quantities and you just compile it all into one meal?
Yeah, I'd say anything where the majority of the ingredients are edible with no work in their own right, but also there's a minimal degree of prep or cooking work. Like take a ham and cheese sandwich, I'd say that's thrown together. But if you add some vegetables you have to cut up (say onion tomato and lettuce), and you toast it I'd now say that's more of a cooked meal. Or like a hotdog that you just microwave on a plain bun is thrown together but if you make some chilli to top on it and you grill the hotdogs instead I'd say that's cooked. A ramen packet is pre-made food but if you add a hardboiled egg, some chives, maybe throw in some cashews and canned bamboo shoots I'd call it thrown together. Hand make the noodles or use dried ramen instead of the packet noodles and use a homemade broth (plus earlier stuff) and now it's cooked.
Idk exactly the definition but along those lines.
Thanks for clarifying. I had never heard of that term before, which is why I was asking.
~80% of my meals I cook from scratch. ~%15 thrown together. ~5% eating out, only socially. I don't really do premade, would be like <1%. I cook my own "premade" meals ie. freeze meals for long term and basically act for my lazy day. I never do takeaway if I'm only feeding myself.
Once you get good and efficient at cooking, the cost rarely justifies eating/taking out, at least what I find for feeding just myself.
My family has been doing home-cooked pre portioned meals 5 nights a week for the last 10 months. We started with Hellow Fresh and moved to the cheaper Every Plate and Dinnerly. With three people willing to cook it makes life easy, and we all rotate through. We also like these because unlike some options, like Blue Apron, you basically get the base ingredients, like meats, veggies, and sauces (which generally combine for each recipe), cut everything and cook it.
If one person is missing (it's a 4-person meal), we usually just eat out, but that's usually just the weekend.
How much does something like this cost? I'd have to imagine it's quite a bit more expensive than just going out once a week and grocery shopping, especially at the frequency you're consuming these (5x a week). But that's just a guess, I've never done one of these programs.
You can actually just get the recipes, and they don't tend to use wacky/far out ingredients.
I also totally understand the price issue. $5/plate is a good chunk of change, and that's on the low end with EveryPlate.
It's $5/meal, so $100/week. We were eating out a lot, so it definitely works out cheaper than restaurants, but more than planning/buying our own meals. It also removes the need to plan meals, we can pick a menu and run with it.
That's actually not as bad as I thought it would be. Definitely far cheaper and healthier than eating out all the time, so I can see how this kind of thing could at least be a good stepping stone for people who default to eating out all the time (or perhaps in your case, for people whose barrier to home cooking is the planning part).
I agree that the planning can be time consuming. I definitely struggle with it because of a trifecta of trying to buy ingredients that are on sale, minimize ingredient waste, and having a wide variety of meals.
Probably 85-90% from scratch here. Some fruit and veg from the garden, bake my own bread sometimes, roast and grind my own spice mixes. I used to cure and smoke bacon, I'd like to return to that and try making butter and cheese too. I get a huge sense of satisfaction from doing it myself and I love that it's to the exact specification that I want.
I think I have been spoiled by making my own things; a lot of supermarket offerings often feel bland or lesser quality (the bacon is especially an area where I feel a huge difference). I also love eating a huge variety of different foods and I can't pick up a ready made doro wat or spanakopita from Sainsburys. Every now and then my partner and I will have a takeaway or go out for a meal but at £40 minimum (two thirds of a week's groceries!) it's hard to justify it regularly.
My biggest vice in the remaining 10 - 15% is mostly high quality instant noodles. The shiitake zajiang and dan dan flavours of Mom's Dry Noodle are outstanding. Although my favourite garbage meal is Samyang 2x spicy noodles with mozzarella, cheddar, spring onion and sliced up spam on top... I make sure I only eat that once or twice a year!
Same here.
Even though I am not a chef, though I did work in different restaurants when I was younger, the food I make at home is better or acceptable enough than virtually every meal you can get at a restaurant.
Which bucket would you put "leftovers from takeout" in? I'd almost call it "premade" if we order extras on purpose. Already paying for the convenience, may as well get an extra container of curry. Put some rice from the giant economy bag in the rice cooker the next day. Suddenly the per-meal cost is about on par with cooking from fresh ingredients, which are decidedly not cheap where I live.
Overall I'd say 25% each, if we're including leftovers from homemade in the "throw-together".
There's just the two of us, yet I cook like I'm running a mess hall. So there's always gumbo, Bolognese, chili, pot roast and who knows what else in the freezer.
From scratch the great majority of the time for evening meals - my SO is very keen on doing this. I would go for pre-made much more often if living alone.
Eating out: maybe once or twice a month for evening meals or Sunday lunch etc, and maybe a little more often for ordinary lunch or even breakfast at the weekends. Just at the moment, we very seldom have takeaways.
I will eat pre-made or slightly modified pre-made lunches at the weekend if at home: soup or beans on toast (with some chilli sauce, and a little cheese or maybe an egg) etc. My SO very seldom does.
Thrown together: well if sandwiches count, then I will have some for lunch most working days.
Most of my meals are "thrown together". I eat a lot of salads and a good amount of sandwiches which I would include in that category. Probably 70% thrown together, 10% takeout and 10% actual cooking. I don't really enjoy cooking unless it's for a lot of people, which I don't get the opportunity to do often, and I detest the clean up.
I'd say 85% of the time I cook and if we're calling Ramen a premade meal then that's probably a good 5% (but, lunches only) with another 5% for eating out and the last 5% for just emptying the pantry and freezer into a pan and seeing what happens.
It's not so much health concerns as it is I'm a good cook and cheaper than eating out... Moreso considering how expensive stuff has gotten. Even my local Chinese places are at Pei Wei prices these days.
Almost all of our meals are cooked from scratch. We go out to eat once every week / every other week.
We rarely order food. At maximum once per month. I can't justify spending a lot of money on food that I can almost always cook better myself.
Mostly cooked from scratch. Hardly ever "premade" meals, with a couple exceptions. Pretty much as from scratch as I can get it. I bake my own bread, make my own chicken stock, cook beans from dried, etc. My wife actually likes to "complain" that "we don't have any food, only ingredients".
I eat the same breakfast every day - oatmeal (cooked from raw oats) with various fruit and a bit of peanut butter.
Lunch is usually leftover dinner. But occasionally, this is where I might do something partially pre-made. I keep some breaded frozen chicken breasts in the freezer to either make a sandwich or chop it up over a salad for lunch if we don't have any leftover dinner.
Dinner is always from scratch. Since there are only 2 of us, I cook about 4x a week based on a rotated protein category - chicken, fish, vegetarian, and "other" (beef, pork, lamb, etc). It's nearly impossible to cook for 2, so we end up getting 2-4 meals out of it and having planned leftovers for lunch or other dinners.
During COVID, we did takeout about once a week just to change things up. Now, we hardly ever do takeout. It's pretty much reserved for when we planned to cook, but some unforeseen thing happened and we have no other food to eat and have no choice. We go out to eat dine-in maybe once or twice a month, usually as a social thing or tangential to some other date night event.
Under normal circumstances, for any given 10 meals, I'll cook 7 of them, eat out for 2, and throw something together for 1. I don't really eat anything premade, such as cans of soup or microwave dinners--it's a general (not hyper-strict) guideline I have to "never eat something that comes in a box", because the nutrition is usually terrible and I can often make whatever it is pretty easily anyway, in an at-least-slightly-healthier version.
That's changed in the last few months because circumstances at my job that don't bear a dry retelling here have me eating takeout for nearly every meal lately. I really don't like that I'm doing that, but I'm working so many hours that I don't have much time to shop or cook like I normally do. Hopefully I can get back to normal soon.
At least 95% of my meals are homemade. But how much of it is thrown together is a much harder question to answer because everything I cook is relatively low effort.
I can understand the mentality of eating out because it’s easier and faster because I was trapped by it for a long time. But the fact is that it’s also dramatically more expensive than making food at home, and it’s nearly impossible to find a well balanced meal with only moderate calories at a restaurant. Even if they offer salads, they tend to be made with rich ingredients that mean they only offer the illusion of a healthy choice. Restaurants are only worth it when you are making it into a treat.
I am currently about 90-95% cooking/preparing food at home, and then the rest is eating out. Eating out is usually something I only do socially or to celebrate certain events.
I've mentioned this in this thread and in the past, but the food I make at home is often better or good enough that I just can't justify paying restaurant prices.
For example, I will never be able to cook a fried chicken sandwich that's as good as the sandwich at a local restaurant. However, I can make an air fried chicken sandwich for about a fifth of the cost, add my own toppings/ingredients and it will be good enough for a sandwich that only cost me about $2.75 compared to a slightly better sandwich that a restaurant might charge $13 plus tips.
My whole foods plant based diet has made meals a lot cheaper. Many meals I prep at home cost about $1-2, with some of the most expensive meals costing $5 if I use some particularly overpriced ingredients like mushrooms and make a big meal out of it. This week I made a lentil stew that I would estimate cost me roughly $6-8 and made roughly 5-6 big servings, which makes it cost between $1 and $1.60.
I eat out or get take away maybe once a month? I live in a rural area with an economy based on farming and tourism, so my options are pretty slim. Food delivery is not offered way out here, and the restaurant choices in town are slim (and also overpriced and not very tasty because they cater to tourists, so they invest in "atmosphere" rather than quality food). However, my partner eats out much more frequently because there are a lot of good options around his workplace.
I eat purchased premade meals (canned soup, frozen meals, etc.) probably around once every 2-3 days. The local supermarket is small and not well stocked, and I don't eat meat (which drastically cuts down on my options). My partner has a number of food sensitivities, and he rarely eats any premade meals.
As for the rest, it's kind of a mix. We will use some easy pre-prepared ingredients (dry pasta, gnocchi, frozen vegetables, leftovers from the previous day, etc.) and we will cook some other things from scratch. Because we have to cook so much, we try to use very simple, quick techniques that, by your definition, might count as "throwing something together" more than cooking (stir fry, scrambled eggs, oatmeal, etc.).
We have a chest freezer and a vacuum sealer, so we keep a lot of leftovers. (It's also good for ingredients purchased in bulk and for produce from the garden.) That cuts back a lot on the cooking effort, as well as expense and trips to the supermarket.
I am a fan of doing an occasional bout of heavy cooking (like making a few loaves of bread, a big pot of soup, some sauces, etc., to pop into the freezer) to make day-to-day cooking easier without sacrificing flavor and variety. However, I'm not very disciplined.
We're about 80% home made from scratch, 15% throw together (cheese n crackers, cereal, yogurt) 5% doctored up premade stuff, mostly ramen. We make pizza every 2-3 weeks, which amounts to enough dough for four pizzas + a big pot of sauce we also use for a few pasta meals, so like 50% of our dinners from pizza-making day. Lunch is usually leftovers or throw together, breakfast is fruit, yogurt or oats.
I can't actually remember the last time we got takeout... I'm job hunting right now, so money is ultra-tight, but I doubt we'd eat out much with money. We only went out for special occasions, and basically stopped during covid. Don't really miss it. Our home cooking is better, except for higher-end or specialty stuff, and it's hard to imagine dropping $200+ on a meal right now.
It’s interesting how many replies are saying the don’t eat out because they can make better at home. I eat out/get takeout primarily for convenience because I don’t want to cook or do dishes! Even then it’s only once a month or less (it’s often too expensive to justify), but it’s almost never for the taste unless it’s something like pho which is a ballache to make yourself.
If I can lump cooking and throwing together as one, that would be 99% of what I eat - a lot of sandwiches for lunch and a lot of salads for dinner, maybe with protein I’ve had to cook on the side. Almost never something totally premade (even frozen pizza we just get the base and do our own toppings), and just occasionally out to eat or takeout.
All premade (meal plan that I get shipments from), no-cook (sandwiches, hot dogs, rice, beans, pasta, soup, canned stuff), or frozen from the store.
I do not like cooking, I don't want to spend time cooking (and not looking to be convinced otherwise). I purposely choose to avoid it.
I live alone. When I don't eat out, and excluding snacks that are not part of meals, I'd say 40% cook, 30% thrown together, 30% pre-made, no ordering out (no longer possible where I moved to; before, it was about 10%).
When I throw something together, it's still a fairly balanced meal, usually based on frozen or canned ingredients and fresh stuff I make sure I purchase regularly for the purpose (such as for salads). The difference between that and cooking is really just in effort and amount of steps. I don't really use prepared mixes, not even spice mixes, and I don't eat stuff like toast/crackers at meal times. You can make a great meal in 10-15 minutes from basic stuff!
When I do cook, I usually cook for 2 to 6 meals at a time, which I attempt to alternate with other meal types until it runs out (I rarely freeze leftovers). Like the thrown together meals, I try to cook healthy stuff including soups, stews, gratins, and sometimes the unapologetic sugary dessert. For what I'm considering "cooking", I'll have the idea in advance and add the missing ingredients to my shopping list, purchase them when the time arrives, then cook as soon as I have the time. Definitely a much longer term process.
The pre-made meals are probably less healthy, usually oven-baked frozen meals but may include greasy or deep fried food (rarely pizza); sometimes (regularly) I have some vegan mixes and such that are probably fine. Normally I try to have 3-8 meals or packages of something that can be the main portion of a meal in the freezer. I never have canned soup/meals and dry premade meals are rare; I've had instant noodles of course, but don't seek them out.