You shouldn't need more than 100 per year, but even 200 would get you around 1000 hours of fighting if I'm not mistaken. Just be sure you have the passives to extend the life of the food and to make 4 dishes at a time. If you don't have the passive to make 4 dishes at a time, buy food, not mats. Also, don't use purple food until you are actually in a purple food situation. Use blue food when you are in most overland situations.

If you want to permanently generate Frost Miriam, it's easy, but takes a few hours to get it going. Just make an additional master provisioner an alt or two, get the hirelings and do the writs. If you don;t know how to do that:

You need a few drink recipes, a few stacks of mats and you can be level 50 quickly. The skill points are the big issue. With a new toon, grab the easy skyshards, hit a few dolmen and if you want this to pay for itself, do the ozorga recipe quests and sell those. Get one drink recipe for each provisioning level, preferably the highest player level allowed for the provisioning skill. After making around a stack of each drink and you'll be at level 50. Then use three skill points on the hireling. With a hireling on your main and the new tood, you might have enough mats right there.

If you want to get tons of mats and level an alt, do the daily provisioning writs. After a little set-up it takes a minute a day. Use the cash from the ozorga recipes to buy the few recipes needed for daily writs. Leave a stack of each of the requested writ foods in the toons inventory. Log in grab the writ from the board, run to the drop box, and you're done. The system doesn't care that the food was already in your inventory. You'll get mats, recipes and occasional rare recipes including the fragments to make the psijic ambrosia recipe. You can sell all that if you want to, but the more recipes you know the higher your chance for master a writ.

It sounds like a lot, but it's not that much. It's mostly just a few hours up front for the skill points. And the big thing there is that you can get them back later if you create a toon that you would want to play later. Use the daily log in to train the horse and be sure to slot fighting skills when you turn in the writs. They'll level up with the xp from the writs. The character will too.

If you like crafting, none of that it a big deal. But if you really don't want to do any of that, just spend the 5k or so on a stack of purple food. If 5k is a lot to you, just buy 25 drinks instead of 100 and by the time you use it up, 5k won't be a lot to you anymore.

not to make this a witch hunt but last time i bought frost miriam it was a couple thousand for like 20 or 30. which really isn't bad at all imo