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~The price of food is higher in our new state than it was in NJ where I got free day old-bread from my BIL, produce from my garden and had an Aldi. I miss Aldi so much. 
Anyway, now that we're settled in to our new place, I decided to make some calculations for meals based on the price of a meal. My criteria for doing this is to add up the cost of all the ingredients/condiments and, instead of splitting it by serving, to split it by how many meals my family of five usually gets out of it. I don't find per serving to be helpful because every person/child and every meal type will elicit a different consumption of servings.
Some things are things only I will eat so I make those for lunch. I'm prone to excusing the relatively high price of my treat items(seafood, specialty meats, special vegetables)since I eat the items over a 3 or 4 day stretch without any waste. But to get a comparable price per meal I multiply the serving cost by 5. The reason I am doing this is so I can look down my list and get a snapshot of what meals are the lowest cost if I made the meal for my entire family. When multiplied by the cost to feed the entire family my treat, I will probably opt for something else.
We have some leaks in the food budget and I think this project will help. So far I've calculated 6 meals this morning. The cheapest so far is slow cooked baked BBQ beans with bacon and biscuits meal at $1.92 to feed my family. With meat chili and cornbread is a close second at $1.99 for the meal.
It's not so easy to compare to anyone else's meal or per serving budgets but it will help me stick to my food budget of $10 a day. I'm eventually trying to get a list together of $2 breakfast & lunches and $4 dinners. This will leave $2 a day in the budget for snacks and drinks.
I guess now that I'm not house shopping anymore and the homeschooling is all planned out and running smoothly I need something new to obsess about. ~
Anyway, now that we're settled in to our new place, I decided to make some calculations for meals based on the price of a meal. My criteria for doing this is to add up the cost of all the ingredients/condiments and, instead of splitting it by serving, to split it by how many meals my family of five usually gets out of it. I don't find per serving to be helpful because every person/child and every meal type will elicit a different consumption of servings.
Some things are things only I will eat so I make those for lunch. I'm prone to excusing the relatively high price of my treat items(seafood, specialty meats, special vegetables)since I eat the items over a 3 or 4 day stretch without any waste. But to get a comparable price per meal I multiply the serving cost by 5. The reason I am doing this is so I can look down my list and get a snapshot of what meals are the lowest cost if I made the meal for my entire family. When multiplied by the cost to feed the entire family my treat, I will probably opt for something else.
We have some leaks in the food budget and I think this project will help. So far I've calculated 6 meals this morning. The cheapest so far is slow cooked baked BBQ beans with bacon and biscuits meal at $1.92 to feed my family. With meat chili and cornbread is a close second at $1.99 for the meal.
It's not so easy to compare to anyone else's meal or per serving budgets but it will help me stick to my food budget of $10 a day. I'm eventually trying to get a list together of $2 breakfast & lunches and $4 dinners. This will leave $2 a day in the budget for snacks and drinks.
I guess now that I'm not house shopping anymore and the homeschooling is all planned out and running smoothly I need something new to obsess about.
~
