Wednesday, March 11, 2009

What a difference one chicken can make

Okay, I know that making things from scratch is cheaper than buying pre-cooked or packaged food, but I really had no idea how much cheaper it actually is, until I broke it down.

Last week I bought one chicken for $4.83. Out of that one chicken, I got:

-12 cups chicken stock
-2.5 chicken quesadillas
-6 chicken tacos
-2 grilled chicken salads
-4 cups of chicken noodle soup

I decided to see what the cost would have been if I had bought all of these items, both from the grocery store and from somewhere like Taco Bell. The total cost would have been: $46.37.

Having made them all myself, even factoring in using ingredients like organic carrots and celery, which tend to be more expensive, the total cost was: $11.15

The total difference: $35.22

Wow, now I know why Hoover promised a chicken in every pot! I'm not even sure I can go back to my old ways of canned soup and all of that. That's a significant difference.

I only decided to do this when I saw that I had only spent $100 on groceries for almost two weeks. That's low for us. So I decided to see how much I would have spent on the same items, and yeah, that's a big difference.

So now I have to decide what soup I am going to make next.

1 comment:

Kristianna said...

Plus, you don't get any weird chemicals in the stuff you make yourself, and you control the sodium. :)