A chicken soup surprise

Everything’s expensive these days, including things that are vital, like, food. Obviously, how expensive things are, and how much rising costs affect us will vary depending on our situation. Recently, I decided to look a little more deeply into my own food costs. It never hurts to be armed with knowledge.

On Monday of last week, made chicken soup again (photo at left), something I’m getting pretty good at. I talked about the soup I make back in October, and I really had no reason to talk about it again—apart from the whole “yes, but it’s content” thing. That changed when I decided to work out how much the meal costs me to make. I honestly don’t know why I don’t do that all the time, especially if I’m sharing a recipe.

In my post last year, I gave the bare-bones (so to speak…) recipe, although, in fact, it’s more a method than a specific recipe. So, I decided to quantify what I put into my latest effort (admittedly, some of it was merely a guess) so that I could price the ingredients on the supermarket website that I typically order groceries from. I was surprised.

Here’s what’s in the recipe, the unit cost, and the amount used, and actual cost:

Fresh chicken drumsticks: $6/kg, 1.2kg used: $7.20. Frozen Peas & Corn: $4.30/500g bag, 200g used: $0.86. Frozen Spinach: $2.30/500g bag, 50g used: $0.23. Fresh Carrots: $3/1.5kg bag, 200g used: $0.40. Egg Noodles: $3 per packet, half the packet used: $1.50.

That’s a total of $10.19 (today, around US$6.45), and would mean it’d be $3.40 per person if three people were fed, or $2.55 per person if four people were fed. I admit I ate quite a lot the first night, and still had quite a lot leftover for the next day’s lunch, so it could easily feed four people, especially if two of them were children (in which case there might even still be leftovers). I had no idea the meal was so inexpensive to make.

If I was going to make a larger batch—well, I’d need a bigger pot first, but if I got one, then I could feed a large number of people for not much more. For example, I could buy low-salt chicken stock from the supermarket (1 litre packs range from $3.50 for the store’s own brand up to $4 or $5.30 for name brands). Or, I could buy a few more chicken legs, or I could add more vegetables and noodles, since they’re cheaper than chicken.

The point is, there are are options I could use to stretch the meal inexpensively. In reality, if I had the family round, I wouldn’t be skimping, however, if I wanted to make my own food dollars go farther, it’s certainly something I could do.

And that was the lesson I took from this: Like most people, I need to be frugal with my spending, including on food, but to do that I first need to know how much things cost. That led me to a realisation: If I’m going to be talking on this blog about food recipes I’m trying out, why not include costs? That’s really for me, to be honest, because some dishes would probably be cheaper (and possibly better…) to buy ready-made from takeaway shops (like Indian food, for example) than to make it at home. I can’t know that, though, if I don’t work out the costs.

One drawback is that the prices will change over time, but that’ll at least give some idea of how cost-effective it is to make a particular recipe (and changing the unit price would make it easy enough to re-calculate). It never hurts to be armed with knowledge, especially these days.

That, and I enjoy a bit of chicken soup every now and then. Saving money is a nice bonus, though.