Tonight we are eating Hainan chicken and rice. I made all three sauces to go with it. Sadly I have no cilantro, nor do I have enough cucumber left to garnish. Steamed broccoli with a dash of oyster sauce will do nicely as a side dish.

The cost of tonight’s meal? I bought the chicken especially. That’s $9.63. The ginger, chillies and lime all come from my garden. All the other odds and ends are hard to price as they were all in the pantry already. I’ll estimate $1.50. Plus $1 worth of broccoli. That’s $12.13 all told. Next thing to consider is the number of serves. We got an easy six serves out of this. So that comes to $2.02 per serve. Plus 5 cups of broth to put in the freezer.

I’m seeing a definite pattern in dinner costs here. I think that for our family, $2.20 per serve is a reasonable limit for dinner. And dinner is the most expensive meal of the day for us. If i can stick within that the majority of the time, I will able to justify the odd blowout for entertaining or special occasions like our recent anniversary.