Minimum Wage Wealth

As we’ve discussed recently, cooking your own food can lead to saving large amounts of money. But exactly how much does it cost to make popular dishes at home vs. the restaurant?

We’ll be presenting multiple threads concerning pricing and how to make big-name dishes, and the true costs to make these dishes. Please note that these prices are not what the restaurant pays, but what you would pay to make the dish. Restaurants pay even less, as they are able to purchase foods in bulk to get volume discounts.

A few notes to the disclaimer:

• Dishes are valuated for individual portions. When you buy food at a store, you are most likely going to purchase more food than needed for a single porton. Prices are divided by the number of portions that the initial recipe calls for.
• We are using recipes from www.AllRecipes.com – I’ve made most of these recipes personally, and can vouch for their eerily-close flavors to the actual items used in the big-name restaurants
• Prices for the dishes at the restaurant are based on my area in the Columbus, Ohio. Prices are for dinners, and may vary from restaurant to restaurant.

This Week: Olive Garden

The Breakdown:

• Linguine alla Marinara (Fancy for Spaghetti & Pasta Sauce) ranks #1 with a whopping 85% in savings when made at home. Ever wonder why they offer an ‘unlimited pasta’ serving size? Because it’s incredibly cheap to make. Most of the dish is comprised of pasta, which costs roughly $1.49 per pound which is quite cheap. The incredible sauce costs pennies to make at roughly $4.37 for over 2lbs of sauce (think about making all your pasta sauces at home. Much cheaper than buying at the store). Here’s the recipe. We omitted the meatballs from the recipe which can be made rather cheaply, too.
• Fettuccine Alfredo is fancy, decadent, and incredibly cheap. Typical Alfredo sauce is expensive to buy at the store, but making it is very cheap. Like the Linguine alla Marinara, the bulk of this dish is cheap pastas. The costliest part of this dish is roughly $1.00 in cheese per serving (approximately 2.5oz of the stuff per serving). Milk and half-and-half also contributes to the cost of this dish. Still, at 83% off, you will definitely want to try this recipe. Throw in some tomatoes and/or broccoli near the end of the simmering process to liven up the color of the dish.
• Caprese Flatbread is a mix of Focaccia bread base, garlic spread, and toppings. Although it saves less than the other two major dishes, you still save a fantastic 61% off the regular price. The large spread (excuse the pun) in cost between the other dishes and this one is the garlic spread, which calls for a large amount of creme and mozzarella cheese topping. The mozzarella could probably be cut back, saving extra, but we were generous – after all, you deserve it!

All told, you could make the 3 dishes for under the price of the appetizer alone. Remember this before you think about going out for Italian.

Disclaimer:

We do not guarantee the accuracy of the recipes offered versus their retail counterparts. However, we do deem the alternatives delicious and certainly money saving.

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Your kitchen!

In today’s kitchen, many people practice the fine art of takeout and fast food. Is the kitchen an object from days gone by, a nostalgic area that serves little purpose in today’s household?

Despite our culture’s fascination with restaurants and fast food joints, your kitchen remains as one of the best places to save money in your household.

Our society is a constantly evolving and changing entity. What is common one day can be out the next (think: Pogs, Tamogatchis, and Cabbage Patch Dolls). Other things become commonplace over long periods of time such as cars, the Internet, and DVDs.

One such trend is concerning how we spend our money, and where we spend it, on food. Since the early 1900’s, our preferences and cost of living concerning food has changed greatly. According to Forbes in 2006, we learn the following things:

• In 1901 the average American household spent 50% of their income on food.
• Of that 50%, a mere 3% was spent spent going out to eat.
  

• By 1997 the average American household spent just 13.3% of their income on food.
• Of that 13.3%, Almost half (42%) was spent going out to eat!

With such a large amount of the average families’ budget spent on restaurants and not groceries, we’ve seen an explosion of fine dining and fast food joints all around America. To quantify this in dollars: Fast food establishments brought in $6 billion USD in 1970. By 2000 the fast food industry had grown into a $110 billion dollar a year industry. This doesn’t include a whopping $173 billion dollars added by fine dining restaurants, bringing the entire industries value to roughly $300 billion dollars a year.

So what does this all mean? Many Americans are paying someone else on the hour to make their food for them. Now, your time may be more valuable than $10 an hour, but for many Americans, this is not the case. We are spending much of our budget on unhealthy and costly foods.

In part of developing a good budget, it is very important to ask these questions concerning your habits with eating out:

• How much money do you spend per month on eating out?
• How often do you eat out?
• Do you eat out with your family?
• Do you eat out because of work?

These questions are critical in determining how much money you can save by paying yourself to cook. If you find yourself spending over $100 a month on dining out with your family, you may be a prime candidate for getting hired on to your kitchen as a part time job.

But What If I Can’t Cook?

Cooking is not a mystical, long-lost art or a skill that takes years to hone. Since we are blessed to be in the so-called ‘information age’ there is a wealth of free information concerning how to cook. One such website is allrecipes.com which  features recipes for some of the most sought-after foods available in very easy to read formats.

Cooking may take some time to develop into an art form, but here are some starter tips:

• Begin with boxed meals available at your local grocers. Many meals can be made simply by throwing the premade ingredients into a skillet and following easy instructions on the bag. Meals usually cost between $4 and $6 per package, and can feed 2 people. That translates to $2-$3 per person which is most likely cheaper than what you spend at a fast food joint.
• Learn to make your favorite meal at home. There is nothing better than the satisfaction of learning to make a top-quality, tasty meal at home. Enjoy the Olive Garden’s Fettuccine Alfredo? At $10 per appetizer at the restaurant, you can learn to make this dish for $2-3 per serving. A gourmet hamburger? Expect to pay $10 at your favorite restaurant including some fries. The same thing can be made at home for under $3. French fries remain one of the most marked up food in the world, as a large fry weighs in at 7 ounces or nearly 1/2 a pound and cost $1.99. Potatoes at the grocer cost as low as 25 cents a pound or 12.5 cents for a large serving.
• Learn to pack lunches to work. Eating out at work can be a nasty habit – it can be hard to take food to work at times, but once you learn how to do it, you’ll save yourself hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year. A healthy sub at Subway costs $5.00 when your trying to eat cheap, but the same sub can be made for $2.50 using the same fresh ingredients. Another key is finding out what kitchen appliances are available at work – many include items such as microwaves which can be used to reheat very tasty recipes which are microwave-friendly. Chinese and Italian taste incredible reheated in a microwave, and are very cheap to make cook at home.

We’ll be featuring more ideas in the future showing exactly how much money can be made on an hourly basis by cooking at home!