Early Retirement Extreme in a nutshell: your biggest expenses are 1) housing 2) transportation and 3) food. Through some intelligent planning, and adding skills, you can drastically cut these big 3 and watch your savings rate soar above 50% to something like 75%+, or you can take my route and be semi-retired at much earlier age than most would think possible.
I am trying to challenge myself to make all of my meals $1 or less. This means my meals will be home-cooked and mostly meatless, though eggs are still going to play a major role, and cheeses will will certainly show up. That makes the weekly benchmark $21. This week I messed up a bit and spent $26. I wanted to try out making a vegetable lasagna and black bean burgers from scratch, so my curiosity made me buy more than I am going to use this week. I'm not completely certain I'll be able to keep next week's purchases down to $16 to make up for the overage, but even if I don't, that still puts all of my eating in the range of one "nice" meal out (paying for my wife as well, and don't forget the tip!)
