28
Aug
The cost of making bulk meals at home
Last night my wife and I made a huge batch of enchiladas in anticipation of the coming of our baby (who is literally due any day now!) We spent about 3-4 hours prepping and cooking the meal, but now we have 10 meals ready to go in our freezer that require only a microwave to reheat.
Sometimes it seems like making one of these meals costs a lot more than I would expect it to, so I thought I’d add up the cost of the enchiladas and see how we did on a per meal per person basis.
So we spent about $31 on about 20 meals. That brings the per meal cost down to about $1.56. Of course, one enchilada is not an entire meal, so when we do eat it, we’ll have to add some beans and rice or something like that. But the overall cost of each enchilada is relatively small (although it is definitely larger than I would think that it should be.) And the price of having home cooked food readily available is hard to quantify.
Overall, we’re pretty happy whenever we make large batches of food. The only thing we need to do now is find a cheaper source for the enchilada sauce which makes up more than a third of the total cost of the dish.
June 25th, 2008 at 7:50 am
Enchilada sauce: chicken stock, flour, chili powder, garlic, salt, water.
Boil your enchilada-meat chicken with the garlic, and salt to taste. Save the stock! Put the chicken aside for the meat. Find a recipe for enchilada sauce, or just play with it. The lumps in the enchilada sauce are a decent trade-off for dropping the highest-cost part of this meal from $12 to a couple dollars.
Congrats on the baby!!