Sick of cooking? Have a night off! (closed)

This post is written in collaboration with Eat Now.

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I don’t want to sound like a misery guts here, but I always miss out on fun take-away night at home. We don’t get takeaway a lot – maybe once a month or so – but it’s always a night that I am out. See, Champagne Husby is a lot of things: handsome, clever, urbane, athletic, and all kinds of fun – but one thing he is not is an imaginative cook.

So if I get the chance to leave Champagne HQ at night, like a normal person with a social life, he takes the opportunity to order a pizza. The kids think he is awesome, they watch a movie and drop pepperoni all over the floor, and I spend the next week or so trying to top up on all their nutrients so they don’t catch scurvy.

But what about me? When do I get to sit in the couch in my trackies and have a stranger bring me food? And even if I do, I really don’t care for those factory-made cardboard pizzas.

Last week we got to try Eat Now. And it was Saturday – date night in our house. But date night lately has turned into something rather less relaxing than it sounds. Dinner is cooked, children are fed and bathed, and then they stay up and party a bit because the more children we have, the lazier we are about schedules because we’re so freaking tired.

Usually, by the time Husby and I get to spend any ‘date night’ together (this is usually code for sitting on the back deck and drinking more wine than is allowed when operating heavy machinery), the children have worn us out and we’re about half an hour from passing out from exhaustion.

So this is a welcome change. And what I like about it is, rather than some huge central hub sending out mass-produced ‘food’, Eat Now actually deliver food made by restaurants in your local area.

We had the choice of a local Italian joint we’ve tried a couple of times, seven Indian restaurants(!), a Chinese place that is nowhere near our house but is so keen it delivers to every suburb in Brisbane, and a Turkish place around the corner I’ve never tried but have always been fascinated by.

Keen to try the Turkish, I was talked out of it when Husby checked the little review tool on the website that basically said, hmmmm, yeah, best not.

So instead we ordered from the Indian with the top customer satisfaction ranking. Because people can be hideous online, so if you’ve got them saying good things, you must be okay. I put together the order in the afternoon and scheduled it to arrive at 6pm – because I am a grandma.

The food arrived at 6pm just as planned. Winning already. Husby, Miss 10 and I loved everything, but the two tinies hated it all. Because it wasn’t pizza. But the awesome thing about that was I made them a piece of toast, and had leftovers for lunch the next day.

Two plates and a few bits of cutlery went into the dishwasher and we were done. Husby took over the baths and I went and sat on the back deck with a bottle of bubbles. I even let Husby come and share it with me when he was done with the tinies. Because date night.

So, all in all, a highly successful experiment:

  • I got to not cook.
  • Three out of five of us ate vegetables.
  • Husby did the minimal washing up.
  • There were leftovers for lunch.
  • I got to not cook.

Yeah, I know I said that one twice, but I GOT TO NOT COOK!

Do you ever get to not cook? What’s your strategy for getting out of the kitchen?

Written By

Carolyn is the editorial director of Champagne Cartel and a freelance writer. In her spare time she is a long-distance runner, peanut butter enthusiast, and single mum to three incredible humans.

5 Comments

    • Yours too? I was so smug when I just had one. She ate everything and her favourite foods were sushi and salad. Now all three re culinary thorns in my side. And their tastes change every week. We have a rule in our house now that nobody is allowed to tell me they don’t like something. I put food in front of them and they eat what they like and leave what they don’t like. That’s it. I can’t stand talking to children about food. GAHHHHHHHH!

  • What an excellent arrangement! We eat very little take-away as well, when the children were small it was just too freaking hard to load them into the car, drive to the restaurant/fish & chippery/wherever, unload the car, wrangle the small people, it was just easier to cook at home. And then it was just the habit that I cooked. However there has been a bit of a ground shift, I have had a couple of trips away this year where the family have had to feed themselves, ie take already prepared meals out of the freezer. When I returned home after the most recent trip, Darling Husband suggested that we get take-away on Friday nights to give me a break from the meal preparation drudgery. I think that is a fabulous idea. And I am off to find out if Eat Now exists in our suburb.

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