More Carryout Dinners, Less Home Cooking (2/2)

"Now with moms in the office all day, everybody gets carryout," Michals said. "Some people eat right out of the box in the car, some take it home. We get business people, travelers, people staying in the nearby hotels. People want a change of pace. One night Chinese, the next night pizza, the next night steak. It's all about ease of execution." In Wisconsin, naturally, the Friday fish fry is a popular option for takeout. Of the 900 meals John Kavanaugh sells at the Esquire Club on Friday nights, between 100 to 200 are carryout fish . "A lot of people like to eat fried fish, but they don't like to cook it. There's an odor. And with the breading and oil, it's messy," Kavanaugh said. "Fish is a great food for carryout. You can wrap the box so the fish stays hot until you get it home. "Some people are loyal about carryouts," Kavanaugh said. "Picking up fish is something they do every single Friday night." Besides harried young families or people from out of town, older people are gravitating toward takeout. "There are people who might not want to go out to dinner, or they can't," said Kavanaugh, whose father bought the Esquire Club on North Sherman Avenue in 1947. "Retirement homes are ordering a lot of takeout, too," he said. More than 60 of the Esquire's fish or shrimp dinners are regularly delivered to the day room of a nearby retirement home, "and sometimes more if the weather is bad." At Milwaukee's Serb Hall, home of "the world's largest fish fry," 1,000 pounds of carryout fish are sold on Friday nights. Some frequent takeout customers tweak it to make it seem more like a homemade meal. Ye-Yeng Wang and her family try to eat together every night. But because Wang heads off to work shortly after 6 a.m. and doesn't get home until 5:15 p.m., it means cutting corners in the kitchen. On a recent evening, Wang picked up a double order of chicken teriyaki and cooked rice at a food court, tossed it into a wok with scrambled eggs, sliced and washed mushrooms, chopped green onions and celery and soy sauce. Within 20 minutes it was on a platter in her dining room. She poured a glass of wine for herself and her husband, and they had a dinner that looked and tasted as though it had taken hours to cook. "I'm a lazy cook and I cheat, but it's not that I don't like to cook," said Wang, who likes to host dinner parties and makes authentic Chinese cuisine on weekends. "It's that I have a choice of exercising or cooking most nights." But her husband, UW-Madison physics professor Bob Joynt, said it's usually a little both. "What she does is aerobic cooking." *Source: The Wisconsin State Journal, Feb. 25, 2006. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. Tel: (800) 661-2511, e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.