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teachingmyown
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| Posted: July 01 2009 at 10:36am | IP Logged
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I am wondering what you all consider a reasonable, or frugal, dollar amount for a family dinner is. I am making our menu and I think some of our meals our probably pretty expensive, not compared with McDonalds, of course, of what most people would eat, but with what a single income family with 10 people should be spending.
I have some old Taste of Home magazines and they would have their "cheap" meals that still cost more than a dollar-fifty per serving. That would be a $15 meal around here and that seems high to me. But when I add up the cost of homemade pizza, or tacos (tortillas are so expensive!) I wonder if I need to be changing our basic menu.
What do you think?
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Milehimama
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| Posted: July 01 2009 at 12:28pm | IP Logged
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We're a single family of 10, and I try to keep our entire grocery bill (food only) under $2 per person per day.
I have all of my menus and receipts for the year so far on my blog - so far we're under budget! We do eat meatless meals a couple of times per week.
I would estimate a typical dinner at our house costs $1 or less per serving.
Here are my plans and receipts for 2009:
Food Stamp Challenge
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Milehimama in Houston
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Jen L.
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| Posted: July 02 2009 at 3:38pm | IP Logged
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Thanks for the link to your plans milehimama!
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Jen
dh Klete,ds (8/95),dd (12/97), dd (11/00), and ^2^ in heaven
"...the best state in which to glorify God is our actual state; the best grace is that of the moment..." St. Peter Eymard
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MarilynW
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| Posted: July 02 2009 at 4:12pm | IP Logged
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Milehimama wrote:
We're a single family of 10, and I try to keep our entire grocery bill (food only) under $2 per person per day.
I would estimate a typical dinner at our house costs $1 or less per serving.
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Wow - you have inspired me - as soon as I feel a little less tired I am going to spend time on your blog and trying to figure out my menus. We are spending way too much on food - without any luxuries or convenience food.
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Angel
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| Posted: July 02 2009 at 4:14pm | IP Logged
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I'm wondering, too. We have wiggle room in our budget right now, but the situation may change and anyway, I'd like to put more toward paying off our mortgage. So it would be nice to cut costs a bit.
I was curious about our dinners after seeing this thread yesterday (and reading about your meals, Milehimama!), so I tried to figure out what the cost per serving was for our meal last night. We had crustless quiche, a quart of fresh strawberries, and frozen peas. I used a dozen eggs for the quiche -- but they're our own eggs and quiche is one way to use them up; our 10 hens give us roughly 5 dozen eggs a week. I also used some pricey local cheese, but it's so strong I don't have to use much. So that was $2.25 worth of cheese for the whole quiche. I was thinking I used milk like I usually do, but I think I splurged and used local cream. If I use milk (which I usually do), it's about 2 1/4 ish c. of milk. That's maybe $.60 ish cents of milk? (If I'm estimating right!)
But now I come to the eggs and I have no idea how much money our eggs actually cost! I'm thinking maybe 50 cents for a dozen (if that). Feed costs are quite low, and I'm not sure how much it cost to build the coop. But we'll go with 50 cents.
The strawberries were more expensive: $4.00/qt. Not thrifty, but in season. I wish they'd come out of our garden, but our strawberries mostly died this year.
The bag of frozen peas was $1.94 and I used 1/3 of it, so $.64.
Ok, so that's $7.99 for the entire meal, not including drinks. The quiche and peas had leftovers, but not the strawberries, so I'm going with 9 servings -- one more than the number of people in our family.
So that's $.89 a serving. Did I do that math right?  I always *feel* like I'm being somewhat thrifty when I make quiche because I'm using what we produce at home (if our peas or strawberries would have worked out this year, I would have used them!!), and I'm trying to make high quality local foods stretch. Actually, I think using cheese from Wal-mart would have been more expensive (now that I think about it, and since I check the latest receipt) because I would have had to use more of it.
But we're nowhere near Milehimama's $2 per person per day! I always wonder if we're being horribly spendthrift when we buy high priced local, organic food, but I do try to stretch it -- or we try to grow it ourselves.
ETA: Ok, I just looked in the refrigerator and the cheese was more expensive than I remembered. So I added $1.15 to the total and came out with $1.01 per serving.
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Stephanie_Q
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| Posted: July 02 2009 at 6:58pm | IP Logged
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I think that, like Angela, we'd have trouble figuring ours out. We typically spend around $200/month at the grocery store for 6 of us, which is about $1/person/day, BUT that doesn't take into account the money we spend on raising/growing/hunting a lot of our food. We hunt or raise most of our meat (venison, pheasant, chicken, duck) We have laying hens year-round and duck eggs in the spring / early summer. We have a very large garden and many generous neighbors have more fruit from their trees than they know what to do with. We preserve a lot of food, so it lasts us year-round. It is hard to figure out just how much each pound of venison, tomato or head of broccoli or apple actually cost when you're not buying it at the store. You can account for what you spent on feed or a hunting permit, but facilities and equipment and energy costs are more difficult to account for.
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Milehimama
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| Posted: July 02 2009 at 10:37pm | IP Logged
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I think that each family must prioritize what is important to them before just cutting costs. I don't buy a lot of organic (honestly, I live 45 minutes from the nearest Whole Foods) produce, but I do try to buy what's in season. One of my children is on a Feingold diet (no colors, preservatives, fake sweeteners, MSG) so I do end up making a lot of things at home (i.e., cakes from flour, sugar and cocoa instead of Betty Crocker) because I HAVE to.
If I could make one change to our diet I would buy organic milk; but regular milk is $2 a gallon and organic is $6! Crazy, but there is a farm nearby that will sell raw organic milk for $7 a gallon! I'd like to try that, too, but not until we get a big freezer.
The second change I would make is to grow more of our food, but in a suburban rental that's not really feasible.
I totally agree about the cheese- I get more "bang for my buck" by adding 6 oz. of sharp cheddar than 12 oz. of mild cheddar!
I started off figuring out the cost of each meal, but it wore me out! LOL! So now I just go with total I spend *on food*.
I am very fortunate to have quite a few grocery stores very close to me - I don't have to go out of my way to visit most of them! I have a Mexican grocery store, SuperWalMart, Randall's (Safeway) and a Kroger a quarter of a mile away, and all at the same intersection. If I couldn't shop the loss leaders we'd spend a lot more (we eat a LOT of veggies and fruit!)
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Kristie 4
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| Posted: July 03 2009 at 12:15am | IP Logged
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$200 a month!!! Hard to believe up here in Canada- a family of 6 here would have it hard sticking to $200 a week and we eat beans and lentils at least 2-3 times a week for dinners, no convenience foods, and homebaked bread!
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Willa
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| Posted: Dec 17 2009 at 11:03am | IP Logged
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teachingmyown wrote:
| I am wondering what you all consider a reasonable, or frugal, dollar amount for a family dinner is. |
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I kept track for about 3 weeks which pretty much covers all my recipes . It averaged out to about $6-7 for a dinner. This is to feed 8 people, so a bit less than a dollar per person.
Some nights I only spent $3 and one memorable night the food cost $15 -- my daughter was visiting from college and I made an oriental dinner with two kinds of stir-fry etc. Homemade pizza can be quite expensive too, though there are usually leftovers.
Since we eat a fair amount of meat (we are northern types and crave our protein) I think frugal would be $4-5 in our local area -- we are in California, which I understand is cheaper than some places. That would be about 50 cents per person.
I try to have 2 lo-cost meals per week, 3-4 during fast seasons. Breakfast at dinner, or a meal of leftovers, can cut down expenses.
Dinner is by far the most expensive meal of the day, because I try to make enough to have some leftovers for the next day. It probably takes up about 2/3 to 3/4 of our food budget.
When I know we are going to have a frugal dinner, I usually make something relatively hearty for breakfast or lunch -- with extra carbs and sorry, extra fat since I have a crew of rather thin boys with high metabolisms. 
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Willa
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4Real Forums : Our Lady's Loom, Larder, and Laundry
Topic: $How much $$$ for dinner?
