Recipe Review Point System

I took some time and worked out my point system for rating recipes. My rating system will be as follows: 5 point each for taste (taste gets 5 points each from my husband and me), cost, ingredient availability, and prep-time, bringing the total amount of points possible to 25.  However, I wanted to add 5 additional possible points if my kids eat it and like it as a BONUS, we’ll call that the Family Bonus.  So, if a recipe gets 25 points, it’s still excellent in my book!  Sometimes my kids won’t even try a recipe, so I don’t want to hold that against the recipe because my kids are unwilling to participate.   Plus, some recipes may contain alcohol or be too spicy for children to eat and I also don’t want this to impact on the base number of points.

A few notes about ingredient availability points—to keep it simple, I have decided that if it is available at Wal-Mart (which almost everybody has everywhere), it gets 5 points.  I buy Organic when it’s available but I am on a budget so the price must be reasonable.  As I may have mentioned before, I live in Oklahoma, and until only recently, options for organic foods have been very limited.  Within the last 12 months however, we have opened a Whole Foods and a Sunflower Market.  I am still holding out hope that Trader Joes will be following suit.  All these stores have brought down the cost of organic foods considerably (thank you law of Supply and Demand).  With that being said, I still purchase the majority of my foods at Wal-Mart because they still have the best prices and I don’t like to go to multiple stores. So, each additional store I go to reduces the points. 

Some additional notes about prep-time and cost—in the future, I will become more scientific with the cost and try to modify based on a $ dollar per serving.   Just keep in mind, that these figures are very subjective.  You may be able to find the ingredients for less or you may indeed have to pay more depending on where you live.  Same with prep-time, a cook that is more experienced than myself may be able to whip up a recipe in less time than me.  Generally, each time we make these recipes (if they are indeed ones we want to make again) we should become more efficient at it.  So, since I am not an excellent cook, my prep-time I think would be based on an average person.