I made myself a promise with the advent of the smoking ban that I'd start reviewing a lot of take-aways and pre-prepared foods. I reasoned to myself that I'd never be able to sit in a restaurant for long without getting itchy and irritable and craving a fag. As it happens I've learned to control my addiction sufficiently that I can now last right up coffee time before I need to go and stand on the pavement like leper, or simply pay up and leave instead of lingering.

Still the idea of a take-away meal hovered and this week I finally got around to it. Since my dining companion Marian Kenny is also an inveterate smoker we were a perfectly matched pair to try the experiment. Certainly what I hear on the catering grapevine is that places that sell ready-made meals are doing good business. Maybe it's the smoking fraternity who now eat at home rather than in restaurants, or maybe it's just that it's so much cheaper than eating in restaurants. There's no shortage of outlets for prepared food, from the excellent Butler's Pantry, to Cibo in Howth, to the Bombay Pantry - which is the one we tried this week. They have three shops; in Rathmines, Clonskeagh and Glenageary. The Glenageary shop is at the Sallynoggin roundabout, which is close to Marian's house in Dalkey, and it was there that we arrived to make our choices.

This is how it works: you go to your local Bombay Pantry, you choose what you want from the menu, and then they tell how long it will be until your choices are ready. We had a twenty minute wait, so there was time enough to go back to Marian's house to set the table and then go back for the food. I suppose if you had a copy of their menu already you could simply have phoned in your order, and then you'd only need to go the pantry once.

At the Glenageary shop there are large windows to the street and through these you can watch the array of chefs at work in the kitchen. Also on display are large 20 kilo bags of Basmati rice which you can buy for about €50, as well as kilo bags of spices like cloves and cardamom, which bought like this would save you a fortune over supermarket prices. There's a one page menu on the counter when you walk in broken down into several sections: starters; chicken dishes, seafood dishes, lamb dishes, beef dishes, tandoori and vegetarian. A final section details various rice dishes, naan breads and side orders.

The starters range in price from €3.60 for samosas up to €5.85 for the barbecued Bengal prawns. We picked two dumpling-like starters, the Subz Bhaja which is mixed vegetables and spices deep-fried into crispy balls and Batada Vada, which is potato based and is flavoured with lemon ginger and coriander, also deep-fried into crispy balls.

For the main courses Marian decided on a vegetarian dish and picked the vegetable Biryani at €7.95 while I remained carnivore and chose the Kashmiri Roganjosh, which is their basic lamb curry in a spicy red sauce. We had a portion of steamed Basmati rice, some plain naan bread and an interesting side order, the Dhingri Matar, which is made from mushrooms and peas.

To complete our feast I'd brought a bottle of the 'Y' series Riesling 2003 from Yalumba, which is €9.99 in Superquinn. I've come to the conclusion that if you want to drink wine with Asian food, rather than the beer for which it was intended, you have to pick your wines carefully. Dry Rieslings work well, because it's a wine with plenty of flavour and body, so it stands up well to spicy foods.

Back at Marian's house we unpacked our goodies onto the kitchen table and began our feast. Everything was perfectly packed into boxes and it was all still hot enough not to have to go into the oven, so we sat down and began right away with the starters. The two dishes looked similar, small balls that had been deep-fried, but the vegetable-based Subz Bhajia was the darker of the two. As to the flavour, I thought it was also the tastier. The combination of the spices and the roasted vegetables worked really well and we both enjoyed them. The potato based Batada Vada, flavoured with lemon, ginger and coriander were good, but not as tasty as the Subj Bhajia.

Marian began on her vegetable Biriani, but balked a little at the large pieces of cauliflower in it. I found it to be a little bland in taste, but then I'd already had a mouthful of the Kashmiri Roganjosh, the lamb curry. This was spectacularly good - fine pieces of lamb in a spicy red sauce that really got my taste buds tingling. The sauce was so good that we both ended up tearing off pieces of naan bred and dipping them into it. We made good head way into the mushroom and pea Dhingri Matar, which may not have been my favourite dish, but had an interesting blend of flavours.

The amount of food that constituted this dinner for two could easily have fed three, or even four not very hungry people. The bill for all that we'd chosen came to €34.25, and when you add just under a tenner for the wine you can see just why a take-away of this quality makes a pleasant change from high restaurant prices. Not only that, we were able to have a cigarette after the meal without having to go and stand on the pavement.