Fresh ingredients, simple techniques and great food.
Lunch
For lunch we took the remaining sweet potato from the brisket of a couple of nights ago, and used that as the base for a frittata.
A great lunch for $1.25 per serve.
Dinner
The evening was taken up with our local Property Owners’ Association meeting and pizza was provided by our local property development company!
Lunch
Since we really wanted to put on the oven, we chose some Chicken Tikka Samosas from Trader Joe’s for $3.99 or $2.00 per serve.
Dinner
Thin cut pork chops with apple bacon slaw is becoming a cliche, although tonight’s slaw was based on a “cruciferous crunch” mix with the apple and bacon. The salad made four serves.
Dinner tonight was a great meal for $7.25 per serve. The pork chop was perfectly medium rare, and the salad had a great balance of acid, crunch, sweetness, salt and fat!
Lunch
Foodie Philip was back in Burbank getting the car serviced and picked up a decent steak sandwich at a nearby shack. The use of yellow mustard with a basic lettuce and tomato salad on the roll was surprisingly good. Not a bad sandwich for $7.99 per serve.
Dinner
Back to our standby quick and easy meal: Vegetable Gyoza in Ginger Miso Broth, which is also meat free!
A great tasting, simple and quick meal for $3.70 per serve.
Lunch
Because we were nearby we decided on Bahn Mi for lunch. Oddly today’s Bahn Mi featured shrimp, but it was good anyway for $8.75 per serve.
Dinner
We had cubed pork shoulder from our Keller Crafted delivery and Greg decided to make ` – the pork version of Tom Kha Gai (chicken). The recipe makes least four serves.
Dinner tonight might not look pretty but it tasted good for $10.52 per serve.
Lunch
Because we like it, we had the egg salad and sprouts in a panini roll again..
We enjoyed this roll a lot for $1.86 per serve.
Dinner
With a new month’s meat box available, and the last night of daylight saving where we can grill in the light, we decided on a rib eye steak with an Oz style interpretation of a Cobb salad, that is replicating the Australian-style hamburger.
The rib eye was perfectly cooked and worked well in the salad. The highlight was the beets, but overall a great meal for $11.97 per serve
Lunch
Another shared tuna pouch with Swiss, along with sliced chicken breast and Swiss.
A pretty standard lunch for us for $3.16 per serve.
Dinner
A new recipe for us: Radicchio Salad with Green Olives & Parmesan. The recipe calls for sardines, but we chose to drape canned smoked trout instead.
An interesting – and tasty -salad, as long as you like the bitterness of the radicchio, which was somewhat offset by the balsamic, for $7.01 per serve.
Lunch
Foodie Philip was late home so he had a Sweet and Spicy Tuna with Swiss and Capers toasted for lunch.
A good, quick sandwich for $3.16 per serve.
Dinner
Thursday night is grill night and what better than to start by grilling some great, thick* asparagus and some lamb loin chops. We served with the remaining Yellow Curry chopped salad.
*Despite popular misconception thick asparagus is more tender than thin.
A good meal as we really enjoy lamb loin chops, for $8.10 per serve.
While we spent most of the month at home, we took a side trip to the Colorado Film School to show off some of our software, and took a couple of days in Keystone while we were in Colorado.
We had a lot of good food this month, but the best of what we had, we prepared at home. We ate out for almost all the Colorado trip, without the food being particularly outstanding, even the quite expensive Snake River Saloon. The best meal was BBQ at Jim & Nick’s.
The averages for this month:
Our lunches at home average in a fairly narrow band and this month is only a few cents per serve down from last month. Lunches prepared outside the home are also lower.
Our most expensive meal was at the Snake River Saloon at $40.90 per serve, for what was good, but not outstanding meals.
Our most expensive at home meal was the dry aged rib eye with endive and roquamole at $11.14 per serve. This month’s meals at home are right on our long term averages.
Lunches at home cost 21% of the cost of eating food prepared outside the home, while dinners at home cost 23% the average of dinner out this month.
Had we purchased every lunch and prepared none it would have cost us $331.70 per person in October. We actually spent $40.45 for lunches at home plus $139.14 for lunches purchased or eaten out: $179.59 in total.
Had we purchased every evening meal out and prepared none at home, it would have cost us $681.69 per person. We actually spent $138.59 for dinners at home and $87.94 for dinners out: $226.53 in total.
We saved $607.27 by preparing and eating most meals at home, plus we have better control over what we eat.
Over the month we prepared 18 different recipes for evening meals.
Lunch
After a breakfast hosted by our local land developer we had a simplified lunch of bone broth with a par baked roll that had a little of the brisket in it.
The bone broth needed seasoning, but not a bad lunch for $3.13 per serve.
Dinner
Dinner was a complete repeat of last night, except the bean sprouts went one day past their use by, and died! We substituted cucumber for a fresh bite.
The meal is $3.67 per serve and quite enjoyable.
