Especially if you're anything above a 7/10 home cook
> Especially if you're anything above a 7/10 home cook
I'd move your assessment down to a 5/10 home cook.
Most restaurants are using ingredients of sufficiently low quality that it is now pathetically easy to beat them on that axis. Using even slightly better ingredients than average puts you ahead of 90% of restaurants, nowadays--even for something as stupidly easy as a salad.
I'm super lazy, but local restaurants have gotten both so expensive and so slow that I'm always weighing whether to hit the local grocery store, grab some ingredients and throw something together at home.
The way people that don't cook talk about cooking you would think it is on the level of work involved in roofing or pouring cement blocks.
I am literally cooking a Thai dish right now. I could have went to the Thai restaurant but tinkering with this dish is actually more fun.