The Cost of Cooking Baked Beans and Cornbread with Cheese and Spinach

The Cost of Cooking Baked Beans and Cornbread With Cheese and Spinach

This is one of my favorite comfort foods. My parents used to make it when I was a kid, and their variation generally involved pork and beans with hamburger mixed in, but when I went to the grocery store last weekend the good hamburger was going for around six dollars a pound and I was completely uninterested in that.

Show Us Your Grocery Receipts, Part Ten: Let’s Examine My Most Recent Receipt

So I made it with baked beans, because I could get a bigger can instead of a bunch of small cans, and without hamburger.

The general idea is that you pour a bunch of beans into a casserole dish, and if you’re adding hamburger you cook it up on a skillet and then stir it into the beans.

Meanwhile you’re mixing together a batch of cornbread in another bowl. When that’s ready, you spread the cornbread on top of the meat and beans mixture. If you’re using a standard 13″ x 9″ casserole dish you’ll want two boxes of Jiffy cornbread, but if you’re doing it in a skillet like I am, you only need one.

Bake at 400 degrees for about 30 minutes or until everything looks done. Halfway through the baking, sprinkle cheese on top of the cornbread. I turned on the broiler for just about a minute at the very end to brown the top, but be careful—you don’t want to scorch your cornbread.

The skillet I made for myself will yield four meals, although admittedly the first portion I cut was a little larger than the other three because it’s hard to resist hot, fresh cornbread.

I ate two of the meals over the past two days and put the other two portions into the freezer for later.

Now let’s figure out how much everything cost:

Bush’s Baked Beans, Homestyle Flavor, 28 oz: $2.29

Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix, 8.5 oz: $0.69

Tillamook Plain and Simple Lowfat Yogurt, 3/4 cup: $0.55 (the 32-oz container cost $2.95)

Tillamook Medium Cheddar Cheese, 3 oz: $1.03 (the 16 oz block cost $5.49)

Cost per four-portion batch: $4.56

Cost per portion: $1.14

(To answer the obvious question: yes, I mixed yogurt into the Jiffy corn muffin mix instead of adding eggs and oil. I had a little bit of yogurt left over that I wanted to use up, and I didn’t want to buy a dozen eggs. It turned out fine.)

Now let’s factor in the cost of the rest of the meal pictured above:

Spinach, 1 cup raw: $0.83 (the three-cup container cost $2.50)

Yellow Tail Sweet Red Roo, 3 oz: $0.75 (the 24-oz bottle cost $5.99)

Total meal cost: $2.72

This might be the cheapest meal I’ve made in a while, and I got to drink wine with it. I consider that very comforting.

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