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Fancy Dinner for Low Bucks

To save money (or for other reasons) I'm trying to recreate dinners we've always liked at restaurants, which I found I can make much cheaper. Here's an example from last month: my guy grilled a steak for him, and I made salmon in the air fryer for myself, with a baked potato, a loaf of french bread with an olive oil herb dip, and a wedge salad for both of us.

Breaking down the cost: I shopped around until I found four ribeye steaks for $23.00 at Winn Dixie (which has consistently been the cheapest place for steak.) The entire loaf of bread was $1.00 at Wal-Mart, and it is surprisingly quite good if you can get it the minute they put it out on the racks in the bakery (that's also cheaper than even I can make it.) The oil/herb dip was made from a 10-serving packet, and cost about fifty cents per portion. The wedge salad came from leftover iceberg lettuce I got for $3.00 and used for two other meals. We grew the radishes. The potatoes were from a five-pound bag for $3.99, also from Wal-Mart, which works out to about twenty cents each. I got my salmon filet on sale for $30.00 and cut it up into 15 smaller portions.

I even found an excellent recipe for the dill sauce for my fish that I made with sour cream leftover from another recipe, and fresh dill from our garden.

With the ribeye steak his dinner cost about $7.95; to buy his from a restaurant would be a minimum of $28.99 for one steak and two sides (ribeye is super pricey to eat out these days.) My dinner had two portions of salmon (one of which broke in half in the air fryer), and cost about $5.95 total. The same meal at the restaurant that I was duping was $18.99 before they took it off the menu; I can't even dine out for it anymore in our area. In the end we ate meals worth $52.98 (that includes a 20% tip for the server) that we made ourselves for just under fourteen bucks.

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