$20 for 7 Days | Eating for $3 a Day | Easy Budget Meal Plan

okay y'all I've got $20 and I need to feed myself breakfast lunch and dinner for 7 days and I'm going to be getting really really creative in this meal plan and I think you might look at the recipes and think that kind of looks a little interesting and different but I'm going to give you some of my honest opinions on these recipes and let you know if I would make them again or if I would make some changes because some of these things I did find on the internet as a vital recipe so let's get to the store and pick up the groceries and then get cooking here's my list today I did use the shopping site to look at the prices so hopefully they are great deals today and I'm using a few things for my pantry but not too much so let's get started first thing I want to get is peanuts they're 225 for 16 oz I think you're going to be surprised how we use these today or this week I should say it's going to be fun next I want to get milk probably just a half a gallon I don't need a ton this week let's see what the cheapest milk is I could use a nut milk like soy well soy soy is not nuts um you know what I mean but I think I'm going to get dairy milk because it's going to be a lot cheaper and I'm on a tight budget so let's see maybe 1% for $181 that looks good I love that it's a little under budget that's good although the prices are really good on almond milk at 2 29 oat milk 3.49 so it's really not a whole lot more so we could definitely do almond milk but I think I'm just going to stick with the dairy milk today okay so next let's get some bread what is this clearance 99 artisanal style thick slice Multi Grain oh my gosh what a score okay so let's definitely do this today I was going to do this one for $129 the white bread but let's just get this one perfect yay I love it right next we need cabbage we're just going to get one head of cabbage for 68 cents a pound let's get I don't know if we need a giant giant one it's just me see if we can look one that find one that looks pretty good let's just get one that's like sort of medium we go okay next let's get some spinach for $139 this one looks really good Go Bananas our next 39 cents a pound I want to get eight oh these look good today okay this is 3 6 7 8 9 10 so that might be okay too we'll have to weigh it and see what we've got here they're only 39 cents a pound so that's a really good deal 4 and2 lb or so so really that's not going to cost hardly a thing so at$ 39 cents a pound so that's great avocados are on sale for 45 so let's get one since the bananas were so cheap cuz what am I making I don't even remember maybe I don't even need avocado so I'm making a stir fry and I'm making Egg Roll in a bowl avocado might be good for breakfast though on toast or something like that this one's good okay so let's just get one45 cents each next we need some Tomatoes just a couple they're 999 cents a pound okay let's just get two just going to make a scramble next I need soy sauce this is going to add a ton of flavor $155 I'm just going to do the low sodium reduced sodium rather still got a lot of sodium but um still it's going to add a lot of flavor even though it is reduced sodium so $155 for that today I'm using honey from the pantry this week but they have some really good deals here at Aldi on the honey right now 2.95 for the honey bears $649 for the SoCal honey that's the one that I like 375 for organic honey too this little one here so lots of good options or maybe Maple s up to would work or any sweetener really next we need tofu $159 do I need two or three I have two written down and then let's see how much the budget allows for maybe we can get one one more this is the extra firm now I need some noodles and I think I'll get these spaghetti noodles here for $2.9 for 32 oz get on in the back here this one looks good so 2 lb for $2.9 so is a really good deal so quinoa is next they have organic Quin one here for $3.49 that should work and let's see6 g of protein for 1/4 cup this is going to last quite a while I'm going to have a lot for the week 3 G of fiber also oh got some iron in it I didn't realize 10% of the daily value of iron in A4 cup that's great okay so let's grab this for $3.49 there we go okay the last thing is going to be some stir fry veggies I like this one for 245 that looks pretty good cuz I like the addition of the snap peas def like 12 oz let me think about it California medley is $119 and the only addition oh that one has water chestnuts in it though that would be really good okay so I'm looking at the nutrition facts here for these two that I'm deciding between and this one has more iron and so that's something that I want to make sure that I get enough this week and this one's got about the same amount of potassium as that one so I think I'm going to go with with the broccoli ster I spent an extra dollar or so this is going to keep it a little bit more interesting I think so that's going to be $2.45 for that I think that's all I'll need for the week so let's go see how much everything costs today so we did find a ton of good deals today but I did buy a few extra things and the total was $23.26 today and if you need a dessert option I'm going to be making something this 70% cocoa dark chocolate I got it from Aldi and I believe it was $2 when I bought it so if you are looking for a dessert option I'm going to make something fun with this or you could just eat this as is it's really delicious and it does contains some iron calcium potassium and of course some sugar protein and some Fiber too so a pretty good dessert if you ask me this first dinner idea will be what you make on the first evening when you get home from grocery shopping it's a relatively easy recipe it comes together super fast so it's great for those days when you're busy and you just want to eat something so first I'm going to start by chopping out the core of my cabbage after I sliced it in half you can eat the core don't throw it away you can either slice it really thinly for this dish or you can save it for roasting the Cabbage steaks later on in the week this cabbage will last about 2 to 3 days in the refrigerator once it's been chopped as long as it's stored properly I personally always give my cabbage a wash and a good spin in my salad spinner the salad spinner is one of my favorite tools in the kitchen by the way now I'm also going to be shredding some carrots I have had some extra carrots left over and in the spirit of not wasting things I wanted to make sure that I used these before they went bad but this is optional I didn't pick up any carrots in this shopping haul but if you have carrots left over baby carrots regular carrots give them a shred and just add them it doesn't matter if you have one or four just add whatever you have on hand and if you have none on hand that's perfect too cabbage is going to work great in this all on its own then we're just going to drain out the liquid from the extra firm tofu and since I'm doing a crumbled tofu this time I'm not going to worry about pressing the tofu because it's going to get dried out enough in the cooking process you'll see I'm just going to Pat it dry with a towel just to get rid of some of that excess moisture but I'm not going to be too worried about getting all of the moisture out at this point so that definitely makes this process a lot faster now I've got my stainless steel pan on medium heat and I'll test it doing the Mercury test that's just where you throw water and if the water just kind of rolls around and it's ready to go then I'll add my oil and reduce the heat to low that's my favorite tip for making sure things don't stick in my stainless steel then I'll add the tofu and season with salt pepper and garlic powder you can use any seasonings that you like tofu is going to soak up all these seasonings and really add the flavor so don't be shy with the seasonings and then don't touch your tofu until it's nice and brown on one side that's how we're going to make sure that we get a really delicious texture on this tofu so don't skip that make sure you leave it alone and make sure it's brown before you flip it then once you flip it you can start crumbling and then you're just going to continue to cook that until it's nice and dried out out and nice and crispy and this by far is my new favorite way to make tofu is to crumble it and make it crispy like this I'm going to add more garlic powder and just give that a stir don't worry if you see a little bit of sticking on the bottom that's totally normal we're going to season with ground ginger and now we're going to add our soy sauce and once we add the soy sauce I'm going to scrape the bottom of the pan and get all that delicious flavor off the bottom of the pan and that's actually going to make sure that the pan is nice and clean afterwards too so it's a little secret we're just kind of deglazing the pan and getting everything off the bottom so we don't lose any of that crispy delicious flavor then I'm going to add that entire bit of cabbage that we prepped earlier that's half a head of cabbage somebody said one head of cabbage is too much to eat in one week well I'm going to show you how I'm going to do that this week and I promise it's not too much it's going to be the perfect amount and you're going to be wanting more then I add the carrots of course and then just give that a nice sauté and stir it all together and then the Cabbage will Wilt after a few minutes and I like my cabbage to have a little bit of a crunch still but you can Wilt it down as much as you want it's going to look beautiful and taste delicious however you make it and I actually made a half a pound of spaghetti to go with this just to bulk up this meal and then I separated all of these into portions so it' be easier for me to eat throughout the week I personally found that this is the easiest way for me to remember to grab my leftovers is just to have everything portioned out already then of course I'm going to top my spaghetti with the mixture and add a ton of hot sauce hot sauce is optional but I love it and I highly recommend giving it a try with this one super delicious dish next I'm going to be preparing the peanut butter for the week I just did this right after dinner so I'd have it ready for my breakfast the next morning try to make sure you have your food processor all locked in I always have an issue with it um because I just don't use it that often but the reason why I'm making my own peanut butter is I want to have leftover peanuts for a dish to add a little bit more texture so if you don't want to make the peanut butter and you want to save maybe 50 cents or something like that you can just get peanut butter I think it's a little bit cheaper um if you just buy the peanut butter as is depending on the kind that you get but this one is just going to be natural peanut butter cuz we're just going to blend up about 90% of the peanuts that we picked up and we're just going to continue blending this I'm showing you the full process here to show you how it kind of turns out it takes about 8 to 10 minutes to fully get it nice and creamy to the texture that I want but if you want crunchy peanut butter you can do that too I just feel like for these recipes that I'm using this peanut butter in a nice smooth peanut butter will do best and of course we're going to have peanut butter to use in a stir fry but also as peanut butter sandwiches and also in a breakfast idea so this peanut butter is going to get a lot of use this week and if you haven't tried making your own peanut butter I highly recommend it and you can do this with cashews and almonds and you can basically do this with any nuts and people have recommended you can add seeds to this too if you like so you can really just make this your own peanut butter mixture and add a ton of flavor and maybe just put some things from your pantry in it to really J it up and add a lot of extra nutrition so I thought that was kind of fun and new to me because I've never done this before until recently but honestly since I tried this I've done it several times in the past couple of weeks so I highly recommend it and just put it in a mason jar or an airtight container and you can just keep that in the refrigerator and it'll last a couple months now this first breakfast idea I'm showing you is a chocolate peanut butter quinoa Bowl now I'm just going to be adding the quinoa and milk to a small saucepan this is half a cup of quinoa and 1 cup of milk it's going to make about two to three servings the milk will boil over if you don't watch it I had to put it on the absolute lowest setting you can see I had to do this twice because I boiled it over you can see the mess I made there so just keep an eye on it and a non-dairy milk probably won't have the issue of boiling over as much so just make sure if you're using Dairy you're keeping it eye and then I'm going to mix together the cocoa powder and the peanut butter in a separate container just to help with mixing everything because adding the cocoa powder and the peanut butter directly to the quinoa it doesn't really mix that well and the cocoa powder ends up being sort of clumpy so I do test these recipes out several ways to make sure I give you the right tips here then I added my honey and if you don't have honey on hand that's something I grabbed from the pantry you can add maple syrup or no sweetener if you like that's what's nice about this recipe is you can really make it your own and this is a really great breakfast to eat either cold or warmed up that's what's really nice about this is it's super versatile and I added some sliced bananas on top for serving and that really stretched the meal as well so you could definitely get about two to three servings out of this at least it's really a lot of quinoa so just you know portion this out to your liking I like to of course portion it in mason jars or an airtight container I can just grab and go and eat on the go so I don't go through the drive-thru and then for the banana peels I'm going to wash them take off the stickers and save them for later cuz these ones are a little bit too green for a recipe that I'm trying later in the week and I want them to get a little sweeter so I'm just going to put them in an airtight container in the refrigerator just to let them ripen up a little bit more before I do the next recipe with those now for lunch on this day I just made a super easy avocado toast I burnt my bread a little bit but hey that's just life I'm still going to eat it then I used half of this avocado today for this lunch it was just a very light lunch I'm just um you know going to eat this on the go because I had a late breakfast and then I will save the other piece of avocado there the other half of avocado for an avocado toast to pair with a dinner later in the week I'm just going to put it in a bag and just make sure that no air can get to it or you can use a beeswax wrap just make it super super tight on the part that's cut there so no air can really get in and that will keep it from browning and I like to add a little bit of honey and some red pepper flakes and of course some sea salt on top but you can add anything you like everything but the bagel seasoning is super highly recommended when people see avocado toast and say they eat it a certain way you can also put a fried egg on top I mean the sky's the limit with this and it is a super delicious easy breakfast snack or lunch idea I love avocado toast now it's time to use those banana peels for something fun I saw a viral recipe and I thought I am going to work on reducing my waist and I'm going to do something different with the banana peels this time I've known that they're edible but I've never been brave enough to try them raw so when I saw this bacon banana peel recipe I thought this is going to be perfect for this meal plan and hopefully it tastes good so I'm going to let you know my opinion after I'm done here and what I might do differently next time and I've linked the recipe I used from a specific website in the blog post so you can check that out but first i'm just going to peel my bananas into about four slices and then just scrape off the white Parts until I have a nice thin peel and my leftover banana peels are nice and brown now so I'll go ahead and do the same with those the reason why I want them Brown is cuz I want these to be sweeter we don't want to use the bitter banana peels here we want to make sure we get the sweetness so make sure you look for banana peels that are Brown and nice and sweet I'm going to use soy sauce but again if you want to do aminos or something like that or different seasonings anything you like for this the soy sauce is just the recommended ingredient that the uh recipe called for then I'll use some maple syrup paprika and garlic powder and again just season to taste here I think it called for about a half a teaspoon of each of the spices and we'll give that a good mix and then marinate our banana peels in this mixture and I'm testing both the leftover banana peels and the already ripened banana banana peels so I did two separate batches here as you can see so I can let you know what the difference is with those after they marinated for about 30 minutes I went ahead and pulled them out of the refrigerator and heated my stainless steel pan there and again did the Mercury test just to make sure it was nice and hot I didn't want the banana peels to stick I used avocado oil but I think any Neutra oil would be fine I don't know that olive oil would work that great because of the low smoking point so just something with a high smoking point and you can see as I add the banana peels it is quite a mess you're going to get a lot of splatter and I'm going to save the rest of this soy sauce marinade in the refrigerator so if I want to do more banana peels throughout the week I can so I'm just going to Brown that on one side it only took a minute or two then I'll flip it and brown it on the other side I did a brown one piece a little bit too much and that was definitely a little bit burnt so I recommend just keeping a really close eye on it and don't walk away from the pan once they're browned on both sides I'm going to remove them to a paper towel lined plate or a towel line plate just to get some of the grease off and look they look like bacon I will say after trying them they tasted delicious and I will be doing this again maybe with some modifications but let me know how you might change it in the comments I would love to hear some recommendations it did taste like soy sauce but it was really delicious and I would definitely eat them and make them again so now to go with my banana bacon I'm going to make an eggless tofu scramble so I'm just going to Pat the tofu dry again cuz I'm doing it crumbled so I don't need to press it and then I just Crum crumbled it with a fork in the tofu container just so I didn't you know dirty another dish and I'm going to go ahead and start dicing my two Tomatoes if you have tomatoes that are not quite ripe enough you can leave them on the countertop with the stem side down and they'll get more ripe on the countertop in a couple days and get sweeter so you can do that so don't worry if they're not you know perfectly ripe you can wait a day or two and they might get you know more sweet as they sit there on the countertop and with the tops of the tomatoes make sure that you're dicing the tops and with the stem end there you can save that in the freezer to put in your vegetable stock for later nothing goes to waste here we can use everything the Tomato scraps add a ton of flavor to vegetable stock so I highly High highly recommend saving those for later now that everything is prepped and ready to go we can go ahead and start cooking I'm going to use a non-stick skillet for this but stainless still will work fine I just didn't know how it was going to turn out and I kind of wanted my tofu to be a little bit softer and more similar to scrambled eggs so I didn't really want it to get crispy in this case but I think crispy uh tofu would be fine too for this so I'm just going to add some oil to the pan and then sauté my tomatoes with some garlic powder until the juices kind of come out and then I'll add the crumbled tofu and crumble it a little bit further and then season that with some salt pepper and some soy sauce and turmeric now the turmeric didn't add a ton of flavor it just added that nice yellow color that you get from scrambled eggs and really makes your I kind of think like oh well this is scrambled eggs so that was kind of fun and then I did add more garlic powder too and you can season to taste and use aminos instead of soy sauce or use whatever you like whatever you have on hand and definitely don't be shy with the seasonings because again the tofu is going to just soak up all of that seasoning it doesn't have any flavor without it so add as much seasoning as you like and season to taste before you you know serve it up and then once all of that tofu is nice and cooked through you can add the spinach I'm adding about 8 oz of spinach it's going to look like way too much spinach but it's not I promise it's going to wilt down to almost nothing so just add as much as you can to fill up the pan and then you can add the lid to sort of help speed up the process of the wilting and give it a stir as you stir it as the heat goes through the spinach it'll Wilt down it only takes a couple of minutes and then once that's all wilted to your liking you can make it more wilted or less wilted I like something kind of in between then you can just serve it up of course I like to add hot sauce to my but you can add any kind of seasonings that you like and just be sure to give a taste and add more salt and pepper or more soy sauce as needed before you serve it up and for this one too it's a really great grab and go breakfast so again I recommend portioning either inmation jars or to just into small you know airtight containers and just keep those in the fridge because this is going to reheat really well that's why we're making the entire thing all at once cuz it's going to be really easy to just grab it out of the fridge as needed and reheat it and of course I'm going to serve it with the bacon banana ban and with a sliced banana too so you can see we're just using all the ingredients here for this breakfast and it was really delicious it was nice and fresh and filling and just such a delicious breakfast idea I love this one and all the recipes of course are going to be in the blog for this one if you're curious about all the details now as I mentioned before we're going to use some of that peanut butter for peanut butter sandwiches this week as easy lunches I personally love to do honey on my peanut butter sandwiches but you don't need it you can just maybe add sliced banana or Jam or whatever you have on hand just a super easy filling delicious nostalgic lunch I love peanut butter sandwiches next we're going to talk about possibly my favorite thing that I ate during this week and it's my first time ever trying it and I think you're going to be surprised but I'm making cabbage steaks so first I'm just going to add some avocado oil garlic powder sea salt and pepper to a small mixing bowl and just give it a good mix and set that aside then I'm just going to chop the rest of that head of cabbage actually just slice it I'm just going to make sure that I'm getting nice full slices and I needed to cut off the end there just to make it a little bit more flat I'm not taking out the core because I want to eat that too it's going to turn out really delicious I mean if you have not tried cabbage steaks let me just tell you right now it is an absolute must you've got to try it and this is going to be only one dinner here we're going to eat the entire half of this head of cabbage for dinner and it's you're going to be craving it you're going to be telling yourself I wish I had more cabbage after this that was that good so we're just going to slice the cabbage put it on a baking sheet and then put all of that oil and seasoning mixture on it don't waste any of it just be liberal cuz we want to make sure that we're getting a lot of flavor and seasoning into the Cabbage steaks flip it over and add the rest of that oil mixture onto the other side and I'm just going to put that in a 400° oven for about 25 to 28 minutes and since it was my first time I was worried about burning it but actually those brown pieces of cabbage are actually the best part of it so just let it go as long as you need to to get the entire cabbage browned I served it with a slice of avocado toast just to make the meal a little bit more well rounded because I didn't want to just eat cabbage for dinner I wanted a little bit more fat and you know some more fiber and protein and all that so it was delicious you've got to try this one y'all seriously and for this last meal idea we're using the rest of that peanut butter it's going to end up being about a half a cup of peanut butter we're going to make a stir fry with peanut butter sauce so I'm using a lot of ingredients from the pantry but don't you can make a lot of substitutions here so I'm adding water soy sauce you can do aminos I'm adding honey you can do any sweetener you have on hand then some rice wine vinegar but again you can do apple cider vinegar white wine vinegar white vinegar anything you have there some ground ginger garlic powder red pepper flakes and then I did end up adding some Sriracha into the mix so I would add it to the sauce next time and give everything a good shake until it's nice and combined and then just set that aside we've got our stainless steel pan again test it with the Mercury test again just to make make sure it's nice and hot then add your oil and reduce the heat to low or low medium and then add your Frozen stir-fried veggies add it from Frozen but be careful it's going to Splatter a little bit at the beginning there so be really careful but you want to add it from Frozen because that's how you get nice crisp delicious veggies that don't end up soggy you don't want to thaw them out you want to just take them straight from the freezer saut those until they're nice and cook through and then remove them from the pan in the meantime I also cooked one pound of spaghetti and just threw that the pan with my peanut sauce the spaghetti did stick a little bit to the pan by the way I should have added the sauce first I don't know it was a day already but in any case I'm just going to saut that up a little bit so it's heated through it's on really really low heat and then I'm going to add a ton of sriracha here maybe about four tablespoons of sriracha cuz this is going to be about four servings for you know lunches and dinners so I added a lot but you can add to taste of course or no hot sauce and I added more soy sauce as well to taste then added back those veggies and this is going to be a really filling meal I'm going to add a little bit of those fresh peanuts as garnish and it adds a really nice texture definitely give this one a try it is delicious and finally I'm going to show you that dessert idea just using this 70% cacao dark chocolate that I picked up from Aldi for $1.99 and this was a viral recipe I saw and the recipe did not work out for the first couple times I tried it so I had to pick up more chocolate and try again although I did save the rest of that chocolate that I used in Prior recipes and just froze it and I'm going to eat it like that but I'm just going to add some hot water to the chocolate and just let that melt and stir now I always thought adding water to chocolate would make the chocolate sees but apparently if you add enough hot water it allows it to melt and get smooth and make this really nice delicious creamy texture to the chocolate I add a little bit more chocolate because I feel like I might have a little bit too much water here so I crumble it up and add it in and it's not melting quite right so I did have to put this on a double boiler just to get it to melt right and now it's all melted through and so now I've got an ice bath that I've already set up in a separate large mixing bowl and once the chocolate is nice and melty completely melted I'm going to put the entire Bowl on top of the ice bath and start whisking vigorously now I did not add enough water to this I probably didn't need to add that extra chocolate because my mousse ended up being like fudge which is fine it was delicious but I did put an extra tablespoon of water in the recipe that I wrote up for this because again the recipes that I all tried online for this did not work out I had to kind of wing it and I believed that it would work so I just kept going but it did end up being a little bit more like fudge which was fine I added some whipped cream and some mini chocolate chips that I had from a prior meal plan and oh my gosh it was so good so decadent you really only need like a tiny portion of this to really get satisfied I love this give it a try though I'm really interested to know what you think of some of those recipes definitely let me know down in the comments what you thought and if you would give it a try because cuz I think you would be really surprised now anytime I make these meal plans just know that it's for inspiration and I make these meal plans specifically for myself for my caloric needs and my nutritional needs so definitely make any substitutions or changes that you need to make it your own and really just look at it as inspiration and hopefully you can find something that you'd love to make in your home of course if you like this video be sure to give me a thumbs up and subscribe I've got a ton of meal plans planned out for future videos and lots of different fun things and ways to save money on groceries and other things like that so I'll see you in the next video have a great day bye

Channel: Laura Legge

Views: 44,795

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Id: ygSEasSS_aI

Length: 27min 32sec (1652 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2024