I made a really fabulous pork loin for dinner.
It was a co-operational effort with my dear wife. I started the loin on the grille outside, seared it quickly, then removed it from the direct heat and smoked it slowly using maple wood that I cut down last summer. After about and hour of smoke, I wrapped it up in foil and brought it inside to finish cooking in the oven at low heat for about another hour.
Toward the end of cooking I made some fresh grilled corn on the cob with the last of the coals, while my wife made mashed potatoes and used some of the juice from the pork to make gravy atop the stove. When I took the loin out to rest before we sliced it, she put some crescent rolls into the oven.
It was a wonderful meal.
Were there any leftovers?
Well, it was a nine pound loin roast. We ravaged on it quite a bit and there was little of the "fixin's' " left, but yesterday my wife and daughter "pulled" all the meat into slivers and put it in a pan with MUCH barbeque sauce and simmered it again for a bit, making the way for "loose meat" sandwiches which we had for lunch. The left overs from that meal I finished for lunch today. (EDIT: Oops, I forgot to add that last meal to the total of human meals we had from that fabulous loin. I had it after I came from work and it "balanced" the total of the loin)
So, If we are counting: A fifteen dollar pork loin fed our family a great feast (four human meals- one of whom reminds us of Chewbacca and he eats like a wookie might- my adorable son, maybe add twelve dollars for all the fixin's) and the left overs from that piece of meat fed us again (four more human meals, maybe another six bucks for those fixin's half a bottle of BBQ sauce, a quarter thing of deli bought potato salad and some buns) and the remaining fed the two adults one more time using the other left overs as well (two more human meals). So with thirty three bucks, rounded up to be conservative, we fed ourselves ten human meals of very high quality EATS.
I do not think there is any way to even approach that with fast food. You would have to give up quality to begin, for instance.
Of course I should probably add the cost of maintaining a working kitchen to that score, but I would keep my kitchen clean and ready and my pantry full of "bounty" anyway, even if I WAS trying to impress with cost savings of doing it all for yourself.