If you recall, during the next few days, I will be making some of my family’s favorite, healthy meals – then breaking down the cost of each to see how expensive (or not expensive) it really is to make these healthy foods.
I had no idea, when I took on this challenge, how much I’d have to stretch my brain. I mean, here I sit with my laptop, a notebook and pen, a calculator, and several webites pulled up online so that I can reference prices I’ve paid for food. I’ve also got a pile of receipts, several invoices, a water bottle, and a little bit of a crick in my neck. Where is the chocolate when I need it? (I don’t have any scientific research to back it up, but I often find that chocolate helps with brain function and grocery break-down calculations.)
Not to worry though, my brain and I have this experiment well under control by now, even without the chocolate. It’s just that some of the calculations were a little more complicated than others.
For instance, in order to figure out the cost for one cup of freshly ground flour – I need to first figure how much one pound of wheat costs, then figure out how many cups of wheat make one cup of flour, then figure out the cost of a cup of flour, and then add up the number of cups of flour in each recipe. Some of you math majors might not find that hard, but I have creases in my forehead right now and a very confused look on my face that I’m trying hard to disguise.
Ah, but I did figure it out. I am happy to report that, as near as I can calculate, one cup of organic, freshly ground whole wheat flour costs me $0.13. Yes indeed. Now that I’ve figured out this information, there should be no limit to the recipe break-down calculations I can do. Unless of course the recipe I’m making doesn’t call for flour and I instead need to figure the cost of say, a potato.
I’m getting this thing figured out though – don’t you worry. The cost for a cup of sucanat? The price I pay for a wedge of cheese? I’m all over it. But if I come up missing at any time during this challenge, I’d suggest the first place you look might be in my office under all the papers and notes I’ve scratched out, where I will likely be nursing some paper cuts and mumbling incoherently about cups and ounces and most likely, potatoes.
Speaking of which, first up – the Taco Potato break-down. As near as I can figure, it cost me a total of $9.48 for our Taco Potato meal on Sunday. This amount fed eight people, which breaks down to $1.19 per person. I love that this is a complete, well rounded, filling meal. I would definitely call this a Real Food – Low Cost Meal!
Next, I calculated the cost of my Homemade Pizza. This recipe is a little pricier to make, and in fact, is not a whole lot cheaper than grabbing some take-and-bake pizzas from Walmart. However, since I went all out on the pizza this time, adding homemade pepperoni, lots of raw white cheddar cheese, mushrooms, peppers from our garden, and olives – I didn’t feel like $9.00/pizza was a terrible price. Especially since most of the ingredients were organic and the crust was made from freshly ground whole wheat flour (which cost me precisely $0.13/cup – just in case you forgot). Cost per person on the pizza: $2.25 – and everyone was stuffed. More expensive than Taco Potatoes, but still not too bad, especially since I only make pizza once every three weeks or so.
There are all kinds of recipes left on the Real Food – Low Cost Challenge list for me to break-down. But hey, once you know the cost of a potato, you’ve pretty much got life made. (If only.)
Have you joined the challenge? Done any real food price break-downs you’d like to share? Do you know how much one potato costs? Yeah, good luck with that. :)
I keep trying to figure up the cost of making homemade pizza b/c we LOVE it and I make it at least once a week. The cheese is kind of expensive and my house full of boys love their sausage and pepperoni, but I find that they eat, at most, two pieces instead of three or more and usually my pizza is a little bit bigger than a store-bought pizza. But I suspected this was one recipe that may not be any cheaper to make at home.
Yes, very good point. Homemade pizza is more filling, so I can make just two pizzas at home and we’re all stuffed!
We have been doing your “6 meals from one chicken” lately and buy one whole chicken once a month. I paid a little over 6€ for a chicken that weighed 1.4kg. From that I got a little over 3 liters of stock and 5 baggies of chicken to use over the next 5 weeks. Considering a decent sized 2 pack of boneless chicken pieces costs about 6€, and we only get one meal out of it, I would say this is low cost! :) Don’t ask me to break it down more than that, my math skills equal about ZERO haha! :)
Sounds like you did great! Yes, I like breaking down the cost of a chicken over several meals. It’s so low in cost!
I’ve got the perfect “calculate your potatoes” solution! When you grow your own they come out to pretty much costing nothing so you don’t have to count them! (At least until Feb. when you’ve run out of all your homegrown potatoes – can’t help you out after that :)
Oh, I love homegrown potatoes! And yep, that is a much easier way to figure out the cost! We’ve had bum years recently growing our own so have about given up. Maybe we’ll try again this year.
Thank you for this price breakdown. By the way, you’re not too far off. In some of the price calculations in the Taste of Home magazine I was reading, they were putting $3 and sometimes $4 per person meals in their “budget” category. That’s not generally the kind of budget I like to run, but it was interesting to see that they considered that budget now.
Laura, I appreciate your math calculations and I totally understand the crease in your forehead, the crick in your neck and the need for chocolate. We go through the same thing in our house! (And I was a CPA before becoming a stay-at-home-homeschooling-mom!)
BUT I HAVE A SOLUTION FOR YOU:
You homeschool, right?! Well, this assignment has MATH written all over it. Give your kids the price lists, scales, whatever. Each person has to do his own calculations (above 4th grade, please–younger ones aren’t quite ready). If everyone calculates the approximate same answer, then it’s right. If not, back to the drawing board and do it again!
Anytime our family finds a recipe we all love, they ask how much it cost and usually we calculate the $/serving while eating it. (Did I mention my husband IS a CPA?!)
You pretty much rock! :) Not just cause you think just like me (haha) but because you share such great ideas. Thanks so much for all your work on this site.
Ok, Taco Potatoes just caught my eyes. I want to offer another name with a teak to it. We spent 9 month in N. Idaho in a little town with a rustic atmosphere restaurant.http://enavilleresort.com/history.aspx here is the link to the history on the Snake Pit. I was a little concerned eating at a restaurant named this but I was in for a treat! They serve an appetizer that is out of this world. So off to home to recreate which wasnt hard to recipe, but organic. Its called IDAHO NACHOS. The same thing as your potatoes except the potatoes are cut thin like chips and other than the lettuce and tomatoes everything goes on a cookie sheet to bake. Once out you add your sour cream, lettuce and tomatoes. It’s so scrummy!
Jami
This sounds amazing! I’m going to have to try this. My husband will flip! Thanks :)
P.S. I do drizzle my favorite oil (olive/coconut oi)over the potatoes first.
We just did a similar post and linky on our site — it was our favorite dinners that are both frugal and real food. I love how you broke yours down to the penny! What a great idea!
http://likeabubblingbrook.com/2012/01/dinner-on-a-dime-favorite-healthy-frugal-dinners-and-a-link-up/
Thank you, Laura for this series about whole foods on a budget – I’ve read nearly every post, and appreciate the hard work you’re doing to break this down for us. It really helps to see that this could actually be doable financially.
BTW, I made your Easy Noodle Stir Fry last night (used Bragg’s Liquid Aminos instead of soy sauce – was so surprised that my soy sauce contained corn syrup!) and it was DELICIOUS!
What kind of pizza crust did you use? It doesn’t look like the yogurt dough that you linked to, but it sure looks tasty!
This post cracks me up. I had already planned this morning to go home this evening & see how many oranges were in my 5# bag of navel oranges to see how much each one of them cost. ;) I saw an advertisement today and they were 5 for $1.00 so I wanted to determine what is the best deal. haha..
A pizza for $9, awesome!!!! Delivery would be twice that and nasty ingredients! Keep up the good work!
How do you calculate cost on your garden produce? I’m inclined to count mine as free since we have a separate garden budget – but they aren’t really free when you calculate seeds/plants, soil amendments, tools, etc.
LOL Love this post. I would definitely be assigning my boys this. Math is NOT my forte…Thanks for breaking it down..now go enjoy some hot chocolate with your homemade stuff. I made a chocolate/carmel mix with milk yesterday. YUM!!!
I just started a similar, albeit, occasional series on my blog.
My first post was to compare homemade to storebought chai lattes. You can read it here: http://braverhomesandgardens.blogspot.com/
I have many more ideas with the goal of determining whether homemade is “better” – with “better” defined as healtheir, cheaper, or tastier.
Actually, the direct link to the post I referenced is here:
http://braverhomesandgardens.blogspot.com/2012/01/braver-than-storebought-chai-latte.html
I’d say you were eating low cost when you consider what it would cost to order that same pizza at a restaurant that uses local, grass fed meat and organic ingredients. I’m a cheap, cheap girl and eating healthy, local, humanly raised, etc. required a total rethinking of the cost of things. I know that I am now paying the ‘real’ cost of ingredients and am not as dependent on the low cost brought about by subsidies and other practices I disagree with.
We aren’t there totally, but we keep working on it and I just try and keep the ‘real cost’ in mind when I’m looking at my grocery budget!
So, save us all the work of weighing our flour before grinding it– how many cups did you get from a pound of wheat?
Many people believe buying organic and cooking at home is expensive. It is not as long as you don’t make the meat the center of the meal. In America these days we have too much meats in our diet (high cholesterol, anyone?). It doesn’t mean you have to resort to eating vegan, but Laura’s post on how to stretch a chicken into 6 meals is the exact idea what folks need to do to cut down on the food bill.
The bulk of the meal needs to be vegetables and whole grains. If you center your planning around the vegetables and grains you have on hand, not center the meal plan around a hunk of meat, your grocery bill will reduce drastically, even buying organic.
I started trying to breakdown the costs of the recipes I post at full price so that others could see what they would pay if they purchased it out right, no sales, no coupons. There are still meals that you can feed your family that are good for them with quality organic ingredients and yet frugal. Here is my lastest recipe post Chopped Ham with Gravy over Rice – http://thefrugalgreenishmama.com/2012/01/recipe-ham-with-white-sauce-over-rice-with-cost-breakdown.html
Just happened to have pizza last night for dinner too! So I thought it would be fun to see how much it cost me. I used your flour calculations, but after reading your most recent post, I calculated it with what I spend per pound on wheat, and it comes to almost exactly $.28 anyway. We had mushrooms, onions and tomatoes on our pizza.
http://thegoodsonfood.blogspot.com/2012/02/pizza-and-what-it-costs.html