Our goal here is to provide you with some idea of what it will cost you, if you leave for the store right now, to put this meal on the table tonight. To that end, we're not including pricing for, say, pepper. You have pepper on hand already, right? (If not, I'm not sure why you're reading a cooking blog in the first place... unless being out of work is just THAT boring. Shudder.) We'll mark these ingredients "staple".
In the event that some ingredient is a little more unusual, we'll mark it as a staple but also tell you what it will run you to pick it up if you don't happen to have it. Since our goal is to capture your out of pocket costs, we're also going to tell you what it will cost you to buy a full quantity of something, not just the part you'll use.
Personally, I *hate* recipes that leave me with leftovers of perishable items. So if a recipe calls for only a half a head of cabbage, we'll tell you what the whole head is going to cost and factor that in. (Sure, I can and will come up with other uses for the rest of that cabbage. But when something comes up and I'm not home to cook the next few nights, and then we inevitably end up sick to heck of cabbage after eating the original recipe more than once in the first place... As my lovely though unemployed husband can attest, almost nothing makes me as batty as tossing out spoiled food. As my mother used to say, its like throwing out money. And did you pick up on husband being out of a job these days? There will be none of that throwing out money around these parts! And really, if anything, probably one should *recycle* paper and metal money anyway...)