Money-Saver-Menu #1: Chicken, Rice, Salad

As you may have read, we're working to bring down our food costs. So, while at Sam's today, we bought:

- 25 pound bag of long grain rice for $11.88
- 2 whole chickens for $7.70
- lettuce for $2.47

The chickens are simmering in the crockpot with dried garlic and dried onions. We figure those will provide three meals for each of the three of us so 9 total meals. We calculate the rice to be $.12 per serving x 2 servings per person per meal (because we like rice) so $.24 per person per meal. The lettuce will last us 3 meals x 3 people too.

Adding in salad dressing and carrots from the store, here's our cost breakdown per person per meal:

$.80 = Crockpot chicken
$.24 = Rice
$.28 = Lettuce
$.66 = Salad dressing
$.04 = Carrots (5 baby)
====
$2.10 per person per meal

This doesn't include the honey on our rice or the dried garlic/onion in the crockpot for the chicken. So... to keep with our budget of $5.00 per day per person, this leaves $2.90 for the rest of our meals for those days. Easy to do with oatmeal for breakfast, egg salad and a can of fruit cocktail for lunch.


We'll be eating the above meal for dinner for Monday, Wednesday and Friday. If there's any chicken leftover, we'll make soup with it and the broth on Sunday. That will bring our costs down even further!


p.s. Do you like the picture? We'll be using that same graphic every time we post a "Money-Saver-Menu".