Ideas For Gourmet Cooking on a Budget
How much do you pay for a meal in a fancy restaurant? How much just for the entree? Even on the low end of the scale, you could be paying around $15 per person for an entree. Sometimes you may end up paying $20-$30. Well, you can save a lot of money by cooking at home, and you can make a meal just as good, if not better than you can find in a fancy restaurant. You can easily cook up a gourmet quality meal at home with ingredients that you can easily find in your local grocery store, and with what you already have in your kitchen. If you do some planning, and look around in your store for some good prices, you can make a meal for $5.00 per serving that would cost $15-$30 in a fancy restaurant.
The most important thing to do is to plan the meal ahead of time, before you go shopping. A typical meal consists of a main dish (fish, chicken, pork, beef), a starch (rice, pasta, potatoes), and a vegetable or salad. For example, you may go into a restaurant, and order a steak; typically, it will come with a potato and vegetables. You’ll want to keep the three elements in mind when you plan your meal. The main dish, should be the primary focus of your meal, after all, you don’t go into a restaurant and order a baked potato in order to get the steak. So, you’ll want to start by deciding what the main dish is going to be. Look in your newspaper for circulars from your local grocery stores, and find out what is on sale. Pork chops are usually a good deal. I know I commonly find pork loin chops for around $1.00 per serving, and they are thick enough to stuff with other ingredients. Keep in mind the price per serving when you’re shopping. $8.99 per pound for tuna steaks may seem like a lot, but 1 pound is 3-4 servings, meaning about $2.25-$3.00 per serving… not too bad.