Recession Recip.es was the brain child of my husband Carlo in November 2008 as the economic crisis loomed. We both love to eat great food and drink good wine, and for the last 8.5 years, we have eaten our way around the world together. We believe that good food and wine don’t have to be super expensive to be tasty, especially during these tough economic times. And we also believe that cheap food doesn’t have to be processed crap with no nutritional value at all–there is a happy medium between freshness, taste, and cost!

Follow our adventures as we try to dine and drink well on the budget of a MBA student and a recently unemployed art historian.

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How We Price Each Recipe Serving

When we go grocery shopping, we try to buy the highest quality produce and meat at the cheapest prices. We try to tailor our menus to whatever ingredients are on sale at the grocery store, or make ingredient swaps in recipes to keep our costs down. We have been known to stalk the sale section of the meat section to find great pieces of lamb that have been marked down 50% because they need to be used or frozen by the next day. Just stick them in the freezer and you will never know that they were 50% off when you use them!

For each recipe, we compile all of our grocery receipts and create a spreadsheet that details the cost for each ingredient. This process is easy when we buy discrete ingredients that aren’t used in any other recipes, but it gets a bit more complicated when one bag of cilantro is used for 3 different recipes. In this case, we just make our most educated guess on how much the portion is that we used for a particular recipe and assign an appropriate cost. When we have to buy a special ingredient for a recipe that will not be used in anything else that week, we include the full cost of that ingredient in the per serving cost. However, we do not include the cost of kitchen staples like salt, pepper, dried spices, olive oil, and butter in each recipe.

The cost per serving may be what it costs for us living in Las Vegas and shopping at the grocery stores that we do, but this cost will differ depending on where you live in the world. For example, the general cost of groceries is much more expensive in Las Vegas than where we used to live in Austin, Texas. So treat the cost per serving as a general guideline when budgeting for your meals.