9 Reasons You Should Swap Your Takeaway for a Fakeaway

1. It’s better for your health

Frequently ordering in means waistlines and overall health can suffer due to the large amounts of calories, fat and salt hidden in takeaway meals. For example, a typical serving of beef, green peppers and black bean sauce with fried rice from a Chinese takeaway has 1,386 calories, 48g fat and 10.7g salt, while a chicken korma with pilau rice from an Indian takeaway has 1,595 calories, 76g fat and 3.8g salt. Compare this with health guidelines, which recommend a maximum of 2,000 calories, 70g fat and 6g salt a day, and it’s easy to see how frequent indulgence in takeaways can have a dramatic impact on our weight and health!

Using a Microwave Combi Oven means it’s easy to cook healthier fakeaways using fresh ingredients. Unlike most takeaways, which are fried or contain heaps of oil, you won’t need to use much at all, if any. Microwaving food helps to keep it moist without the need for oil. That’s great news for waistlines and for hearts, as for every less tablespoon of oil you use, you save 100 calories and 11g of fat.

All the usual tricks to lower calories, fat and salt are also suitable for creating a fakeaway using your microwave. For example, choosing lean cuts of meat, opting for fish instead of red meat and using natural yogurt instead of cream are all easy ways to cut calories and fat. You can also add flavour with onions, garlic, herbs, spices, chilli and pepper rather than salt! Plus, one of the biggest fakeaway wins is using your microwave to prepare perfect rice that’s fat-free, rather than having a takeout version that’s fried or comes with added oil, such as pilau.

2. It can save you time

Opting for a takeaway might seem the ultimate time saver but, in most cases, you can put together your own fakeaway in less time than it takes to order and wait for the delivery.

Multifunctional appliances, such as the Panasonic CD87 Microwave Combi Oven, combine elements of microwave, conventional oven and grill functions to ensure optimum cooking results, for example chicken wings which are crispy on the outside, and succulent on the inside, or the perfect pizza with stringy, melted cheese and no soggy bottom in sight.

3. It’s easier to control portions

Ever fallen into a food coma after ordering in? Chances are you’re not alone! A recent report confirms what most of us already know – that takeaways come in huge portions, far exceeding recommended serving sizes. On top of this, it’s easy to get carried away when we’re looking at the takeout menu, especially if we’re ravenous. The result: we order way more food than we can comfortably eat.

This is bad news for our waistlines, as numerous studies show the more food we have in front of us, the more we eat. But it’s also bad news for the environment. In a recent survey, a massive 53% of respondents said they felt portions when dining out or ordering a takeaway were too large and contributing unnecessarily to food waste. No surprises then that the same survey found that, on average, we leave around 8% of the food we order – and this ends up in landfill. Making your own fakeaway is the answer to portion control and minimal food wastage.

4. They’re great for reducing waste

On top of big portions, it’s also easy to order in way too much takeaway food, leaving us with a load of leftovers we end up guiltily binning later in the week. Worse still, having a takeaway instead of cooking a meal from scratch can also mean we’re left with a load of ingredients that go past their use-by date and so need to be thrown away!

According to Love Food Hate Waste, we throw away a massive five million tonnes of perfectly good food a year – enough to fill nine Wembley stadiums or 100 Royal Albert Halls! It’s equal to a typical family with children binning around eight meals a week and putting £70 of food that could easily have been eaten in the bin each month – that’s a huge waste of £840 a year or £8,400 in a decade! When it comes to what we’re putting in the bin, it’s estimated that 25% is leftovers, where we’ve cooked or served too much, while 41% comes from food we’ve not used in time, that has become mouldy, mushy or rotten, or has passed its use-by date.

It’s bad news for the environment because all this uneaten food ends up in landfill. Here, bacteria starts to break it down, creating harmful climate-changing greenhouse gases.

Fakeaways are the perfect solution. Creating your own meals means you can better control the amount of food you prepare, which often means less waste. Fakeaways are also great for using up ingredients in your fridge such as fresh vegetables, meat, fish, leftover jars of sauces and canned tomatoes, with the result that they end up in your tummy rather than the bin.

Using the Panasonic Microwave CD87 Combi Oven’s Genius Sensor makes cooking even more simple. This technology automatically scans food inputted into its drum to determine optimum cooking time and temperature, to guarantee perfect results regardless of the ingredients. Visit Panasonic’s The Ideas Kitchen, too, for stacks of delicious fakeaway recipes that can be cooked in your microwave oven, including curries, tacos, ribs, chicken dishes, falafel, wraps and fish and chips.

5. You can create meals to suit your needs

Nut-free, vegan, gluten-free, low-carb, dairy-free? Whether you need to know – or prefer to know – exactly what you’re eating, making your own takeaways is a great idea. It means you’ll have full access to ingredients lists and nutritional information, something that’s not common with takeaways unless you’re ordering from a large chain.

Creating fakeaways means you can be 100% sure they meet any specific dietary needs you or your family have, and you can be totally confident they’ll be free of any ingredients you don’t want!

6. You can makeover meals to add nutrients

As well as employing tricks to cut calories, fat and salt, fakeaways give you the opportunity to make meals more nutritious by adding ingredients that boost protein, fibre, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. Equally, you can also pack in extra veg to help you reach 5-a-day and pad out meals to give a big, takeaway-style portion, but without the extra calories; that’s great news for your overall health as it’s not something you can easily do when ordering in.

Using a Microwave Combi Oven to cook meals is also a great way to maximise nutrients such as vitamin C and folate, which are easily destroyed by heat and water. Studies show that cooking vegetables in a microwave can help to preserve these nutrients thanks to shorter cooking times and less water being needed.

7. You can save £££s

A new report found the average household in the UK spends £38 a month on takeaways – that’s £456 a year or a staggering £4,560 in a decade! Faking it costs a fraction of this. For example, using your microwave to make a chicken tikka masala from 500g chicken breast, a jar of ready-made sauce and cooking some basmati rice costs around £5.25 for four people.

8. It’s better for the environment

Takeaways also come at an extra cost to the environment. Like all food, greenhouse gases are created as a result of producing, packaging, transporting, storing and cooking food. But with takeaways, there’s additional environmental cost as the cooked food is then re-packaged rather than going straight onto plates.

In the EU alone, one study has estimated that 2,025 million takeaway containers are used each year, with plastic ones being the most detrimental to the environment, followed by aluminium, then polystyrene. Most containers are single use and can’t be recycled either. Meanwhile, whether you have takeaways delivered, or you collect them yourself, there’s the extra carbon footprint of transporting them from the restaurant to your home.

Making your own takeaways quite simply reduces the need for extra packaging and transport. Using a Microwave Combi Oven rather than a standard oven to prepare a fakeaway also reduces cooking time, which saves energy, an important part of looking after our environment. In one study, heating up an Indian ready meal in an electric oven took 30 minutes, used 0.66kWh energy and cost just over 11p. In a microwave oven it took just 19 minutes, used 0.42kWh energy and cost 7p!

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