Sometimes it is the little things that add up

While on a daily basis, what we choose to eat does not seem to matter much, it is these simple decisions that can have a profound impact on our financial outlook.  According to a 2015 study, Americans spend about $53/week eating lunch (about $3,000 total) Of this, $20 per week ($1000/year) is spent eating at restaurants.  With a bit of planning and forethought, these costs can be drastically reduced.

A lot of this is down to poor organization.  Whenever you can’t figure out what to make for yourself, it is too easy nowadays to order take-out or go to a restaurant.  It is for this reason, that we plan out all of our lunches for the week.  We have made it a family tradition, and Simon loves cooking with us in the kitchen!  It also helps that we don’t need a lot of variety in our lunches.

The Instant Pot

As we said in an earlier post, we are huge fanatics of the Instant Pot!  So much so, that we brought one to Saudi Arabia from the US.  That and our Vitamix were the two most important things we brought over!  I would say that we probably use it three to four times per week.

I thought it would be interesting to see exactly how much we spend on lunch per week so I took our ‘go to’ recipe and worked out how much it costs per meal.  Since I wanted to put the figures in US dollars rather than Saudi Riyals, and I didn’t have a US grocery store handy, I used the Kroger website for prices. (your actual prices may vary slightly)

Chicken Taco Chili

Recipe:

1. Cook rice in a rice cooker as directed
2. Place everything else (Except corn) in the Instant Pot
3. Set timer on Manual for 8 minutes
4. Let natural release for 10 minutes before opening the valve
5. Take chicken out and shred
6. Combine chicken, rice, and corn and stir

It is probably the easiest thing to make in the world.  We use a simple kitchen scale to portion out the chili using a funnel designed for canning.  For storage, we use Ball jars.  We prefer to use plastic lids rather than the metal ones that come with it.

After zeroing the scale, we put the jar and funnel on and measure out about 800 grams of chili.  This makes 7 portions.

That averages to $2.20 per meal.  Not too bad!  It doesn’t necessarily make all 10 portions that we need for both of us.  But we do order in from a local restaurant every Tuesday (this was set up for our colleague) and the other meal we cover with leftovers from our dinners throughout the week.

Do you have any cost-saving recipes?