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After carefully budgeting and promising herself she’d “eat out less,” local woman Sophie Brooks (29) has arrived at a grim truth: making Pad Thai at home isn’t just more expensive—it’s far more demoralising than ordering it from her local Thai place, ‘Wok This Way’.
Armed with high hopes and a recipe blog full of convoluted ingredient swaps, Sophie set off to the shops with a list that included tamarind paste, palm sugar, and two types of soy sauce. “I thought it’d be, like, twenty bucks tops,instead it was $67!” total on her receipt.” Sophie sighed.
An hour later—after sweating over the wok and juggling half a pantry’s worth of condiments—Sophie’s effort resulted in a sticky, clumpy dish that tasted almost right but lacked the magic of takeaway. “It was edible, I guess,” she concedes, surveying her fish sauce-scented apartment. “But not good. And now I’m too stuffed to even eat it.”
After crunching the numbers, Sophie realised that for the same price, she could’ve ordered three Pad Thais from Wok This Way, with enough left over for some spring rolls. “They’d probably chuck in a bag of prawn crackers too,” she sighs.
“The worst part?” Sophie adds,glaring at the opened jar of tamarind paste in the fridge. “What do I do with all these ingredients?”.
