Cheap Tuesday - Takeaway or Fast Food Alternatives

A couple of years ago we were regularly buying takeaway two times a week, and because of the expense of most takeaway we found ourselves often choosing takeaway with the poorest nutritional value like hot chips or fast food pizzas because they were cheapest. With our lives so full and busy it felt like that was the only way to manage, but we got to a point where we realised that the choice of money vs nutrition was not something we wanted to be making. We also found that ordering and picking up the food often took around 1/2 hour anyway so we often weren't really saving time through takeaway.

Our lives are just as full and busy (often more so) than before but because we now plan for all those super busy days where you are too tired to even think about caring what is put on the table, we don't have to resort to the money vs nutrition decision. We can have both through:

• Planning our meals ahead of time (I will be doing a post on this more thoroughly soon)
• Using the slowcooker to prepare meals for us (you will see lots more posts on this too)
• Deciding on takeaway limits - when we first started consciously working on this area we limited ourselves to 1 takeaway a fortnight and it had to have some kind of hope of providing our bodies with something good so we pretty much chose Subway or Subway! Now we have a limit of 1 per month but because it is occasional we don't stress too much about the nutrition thing any more.
• Freezing your own meals - do a double batch of something and put it in the freezer for another time. We rarely do this because our kids love to take leftovers for lunch the next day (yes, and eat it cold, bleh!) and we don't have pots or ovens big enough to do three times batches for our family :P
• Homemade takeaway - we've found buying frozen meals (e.g. nuggets or chips) on the way home to put in the oven while doing baths, homework etc often works out about the same time as buying it as takeaway, but we are much more likely to add a salad or some frozen vege if we've put it in the oven at home. Plus it costs 1/4 of the price. (If you are able to have these things in your freezer then that's even better, but we rarely do it because food is eaten as seen in our family :P)
• Have 'make do' meal ideas ready - the boys love scrambled eggs on toast, jaffles/toasted sandwiches or even salad sandwiches and then if we're really desperate we sometimes resort to cereal.

We found that after working takeaway out of our automatic thinking that now takeaway often seems like more effort than many of the alternatives!