While the Foodies had an overnight trip to San Diego, our host bought dinner, so this month we didn’t buy a single evening meal prepared outside the home.
The averages for this month:
- Lunch prepared at home $3.04 ($2.51 in November)
- Lunch eaten or purchased outside the home: $10.73 ($10.94)
- Dinner eaten at home: $5.49 ($5.43)
- Dinner eaten out: $0 ($6.73).
Our lunches at home average in a fairly narrow band and this month’s average is up a little from from last month.
We again twelve meals prepared outside the home (mostly lunch). Our most expensive meal for the month was the strange seafood vegetable stew at Riva in Santa Cruz for $30.55 per serve.
Our most expensive at home meal was lunch at The Country Deli on New Year’s Eve at $25.15 per serve. (Although in fairness, we got a major contribution to two more meals as well.)
This month, lunches at home cost 28% of the cost of eating lunches prepared outside the home. Using last month’s dinners out as a reference, dinners at home cost 33% of those prepared outside the home.
Had we purchased every lunch and prepared none it would have cost us $332.63 per person in December. We actually spent $54.68 for lunches at home plus $118.02 for lunches purchased or eaten out: $172.70 in total.
Had we purchased every evening meal out and prepared none at home, it would have cost us $501.90 per person. We actually spent $159.33 for dinners at home and nothing for dinners out, or $159.33 in total.
This month’s savings from preparing most of our food at home is $502.50 and we had a lot more control over what we eat.
Over the month we prepared 18 different recipes for evening meals.