During March we not only continued the home renovation, although without having to leave home, had Foodie Greg’s niece stay with us for a week, just as Los Angeles County headed into lockdown due to the Vovid-19 virus.
Instead of dining in at our favorite local restaurants, she got to experience them as take away. It’s also pretty clear that there are some meals that are best eaten quickly after being prepared.
Also due to the lockdown there were no meetings this month, but we did eat down near LAX when collecting said niece. The other “not prepared at home” meals not prepared at home were left over Gyros we’d over ordered at lunch.
The averages for this month:
- Lunch prepared at home $2.45 ($2.43 in February)
- Lunch eaten or purchased outside the home: $9.13 ($11.36)
- Dinner eaten at home: $5.83 ($6.55)
- Dinner eaten out: $15.87 ($10.00).
Our lunches at home average in a fairly narrow band and this month’s average is almost exactly the same as last mont.
We ate 12 of the 64 meals in the month that were prepared outside the home (all but two were lunch).
Our most expensive meal for the month was lunch from The Country Deli (take out) at $22.16 per serve.
Our most expensive (and only) meal out was at Truxton’s, where the Foodies had some very good Poke and the meal averaged $24.24 per serve.
This month, lunches at home cost 27% of the cost of eating lunches prepared outside the home. Dinners at home cost 37% of those prepared outside the home, although the true number should be 24% if we exclude the Gyros.
Had we purchased every lunch and prepared none it would have cost us $283.03 per person in January. We actually spent $46.55 for lunches at home plus $109.57 for lunches purchased or eaten out: $156.12 in total.
Had we purchased every evening meal out and prepared none at home, it would have cost us $491.97 per person. We actually spent $169.13 for dinners at home and $31.74 for dinners out, or $200.87 in total.
This month’s savings from preparing most of our food at home is $424.01 and we had a lot more control over what we eat.
Over the month we prepared 22 different recipes for evening meals.