Not the person to ask!

I hardly ever go to restaurants for two main reasons. For a start they are expensive when compared to meals I can cook at home. To be honest, on the odd occasion I do go to one I spend the time looking at the menu not in choosing what I want, but in locating the cheapest dishes and choosing between them. Even then, when the bill comes I am left thinking how many meals I could have bought and cooked for that price at home. The overriding feeling I get from going to a restaurant is one of guilt over the amount of money I have spent.

There’s another problem for me, namely the fact that I am a very good home cook. I have said previously that there are very few meals that I can get in a restaurant that I couldn’t cook just as well at home for a fraction of the price. However, there is another element that I don’t often reflect on. Restaurants use ingredients like sugar and salt in amounts I would never dream of, so often all I taste is the sweetness or saltiness of a dish. I am well aware that the vast majority of people enjoy the liberal use of those ingredients but I never add extra salt to any meal whilst cooking and I never combine sweet and savoury ingredients. Sometimes, I regret my choices of meals and that makes me feel even worse when the final bill arrives.

There was a time when I used to enjoy going to restaurants, but that was a time when I was first going out with Janet and we had some disposable income. The restaurants we went to were usually chains and therefore cheaper but I enjoyed the opportunity to go somewhere for dates where we could be on our own and just talk. Also, at that time, I never had anywhere to cook which was conducive to making decent meals. Through times of relatively small income and the arrival of our children, we got used to taking sandwiches and other food from home to save our money and if we did go out it was to a McDonald’s in the majority of cases.

We went to a Wimpy last weekend, the same Wimpy we used to go to regularly when we were first dating and I did enjoy that, but even that is a couple of times a year style treat. We don’t have friends who we go out for meals with, but if we did I would do everything I could to persuade them to eat at our house so I could cook something much cheaper and, to me, far more edible.