SPEND DISH Italian Sausage $5.00 $2.50 Shitake Mushrooms $2.00 $2.00 Onion $0.50 $0.25 Green peppers $0.75 $0.40 Garlic $0.50 $0.25 Tomato paste $0.75 $0.30 Fresh Italian Parsley $1.00 $0.20 Stock $1.50 $1.50 Wine $10.00 $3.60 Cheese $4.00 $0.50 Spices $5.00 $0.50 Pasta $4.00 $2.00 TOTAL $35.00 $14.00

The SPEND column in the table above refers to the money you will spend at the grocery store for all the ingredients noted above. However, keep in mind that you're only going to use a portion of these ingredients to make your pasta dish -- the proportional costs for making just the dish are noted in the DISH column above. With the example above, it cost you $14 to make a fettuccine pasta dish with a sausage mushroom sauce with wine. Notice further that this dish will easily make 3-4 servings, bring the cost of a single meal to somewhere between $4 and $5. A similar meal at a restaurant would have cost you way more than $10 with tax and tip. Cooking at home just saved you at least 60% of that amount. Being a business school student, I must qualify that I have not accounted for another type of cost here called the opportunity cost, which refers to the cost of missing the opportunity to do to something else during the time you spent preparing this dish. The dish will take you about 30 minutes to prepare. If you lead an extremely busy lifestyle where you could have made $100 in that same time, then I agree, it might not make monetary sense for you to spend that same time in the kitchen. But if you can afford to spend the time, cooking at home will easily save you about $250/month, in other words, cut your spend in half. For a whole year, that's more than $3,000. Convinced?