During June we continue in isolation due to the epidemic, so there was no eating out for the third month running. Since there doesn’t appear to be any eating out in our future, I’m dropping it from the summary.
We have narrowed our range of take-out meals to those that travel well enough to not be compromised. We added Mr Fish and Chips in Simi Valley because we can merge it with an Aldi trip. In vented containers the Fish and Chips weren’t significantly compromised.
The averages for this month:
- Lunch prepared at home $2.74 ($2.44 in April)
- Lunch eaten or purchased outside the home: $10.66 ($9.87)
- Dinner eaten at home: $5.83 ($5.14).
Our lunches at home average in a fairly narrow band and this month’s average is almost slightly up, but within normal variation.
We ate four lunches, of 64 meals in the month, that were prepared outside the home.
Our most expensive meal of the month was the Pork Sirloin Filets in Marinara Sauce. Definitely our most expensive at $12.47, but not the best meal of the month. Our evening meal average cost is right in the middle of the expected range.
This month, lunches at home cost 27% of the cost of eating lunches prepared outside the home.
Had we purchased every lunch and prepared none it would have cost us $319.80 per person in January. We actually spent $71.23 for lunches at home plus $42.64 for lunches purchased or eaten out: $120.15 in total.
Had we purchased every evening meal out and prepared none at home, it would have cost us $300 per person. We actually spent $159.28 for dinners at home and $0 for dinners out, or $113.87 in total.
This month’s savings from preparing most of our food at home is now hard to calculate, but we definitely save by cooking for ourselves, and we had a lot more control over what we eat.
Over the month we prepared 23 different recipes for evening meals.