Economics of Home Cooking
I cooked a pan load of chilli con carne last night using the recipe on this blog.
The kilo of organic lean beef mince from Waitrose cost just under £10, the organic beans and tomatoes another three and if you add in the herbs, wine and spices then the total is under £20. Obviously, using cheaper ingredients could cut this cost. In fact when I made the previous batch a few weeks ago, I used some of the same organic mince, which was just about to go past its sell-by date. It cost just £6. So I always look for more of this, as lean meat is good for my cholesterol.
I make the chilli con carne in one large saucepan, so it really isn’t a great problem for washing up either!
I reckon that for my £20 or less, I get eight portions of about 400 grams each. Last night we ate three large portions with microwaveable rice and the rest I froze in one double and two single ones.
So each organic chilli con carne, with lean beef, lots of spices and included wine cost me £2.50. That’s about £6.25 a kilo.
Perhaps this is expensive, but it is very simple to do and I could cut the cost to about £1.50 (£4.25 a kilo), by using less expensive beef, cheap plonk and ordinary kidney beans and tomatoes.
A look on Waitrose‘s web site shows that they have a prepared chilli con carne at £5.98 a kilo.
Is mine better? Don’t know! But I suspect it has more meat in it and being a coeliac I know that it is totally gluten-free.
The Anonymous Widower 
[…] Organic Food? There has been a report that says that organic food is no better than non-organic. I probably agree, but then I use it in most of my cooking. […]
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