EXTREME BUDGET FAMILY MEALS // $3 DINNERS // ALDI EDITION

[Music] hey you guys welcome back to my channel if you are new to see minnie mom welcome to my kitchen today i am sharing with you three more three dollar dinners and this time i shopped at all these so stay tuned all right you guys i put up the video last month it was pretty popular it was a three dollar dinner video from walmart and i challenged myself to spend just ten dollars and see if i can make three meals for my family of five with ten dollars worth of items from walmart so i decided i would try that again at another store and this time i chose aldi so my challenge was to spend about ten dollars in aldi and see what kind of meals i could make for my family it's my husband myself and our three children who are 11 8 and 7. so let's jump into the video i will show you what i bought at aldi i'll tell you how much i paid for it and then i'll show you what i'm making for my family with those ingredients here is my little aldi haul and believe it or not i'm going to get three meals for my family with what you see here plus just a couple of items which i will tell you about just some you know basic pantry staples and seasonings and stuff like that so first off i picked up a whole chicken it was 95 cents a pound so this little chicken that is almost five pounds was only four dollars and sixty seven cents and i'm going to cook this in my crock pot and i'm going to use the meat from it in the three meals that i'm making and then i'm gonna use the bones from it the carcass to make some chicken stock for one of the meals i picked up two pounds of carrots it is a great deal at my aldi it is 99 cents for two pounds and i'm gonna be able to use those in my recipes one package of egg noodles and i'm gonna use some of them in one recipe and some of them in another recipe a can of green beans a carton of sour cream one box of stuffing mix and one of the great things about this type of thing in a budget haul is that it's already seasoned so if you are short on seasonings in your household then um using these types of things can be a big lifesaver because it already comes seasoned and one package of frozen green beans here are a few of the things that i already have on hand that i'm going to be using in these recipes i tried to keep it very simple i'm using some onions and garlic i have stopped including this in my budget recipes as part of my grocery haul because i pretty much always have these things on hand it is a very easy simple cheap way to add flavor to your dishes and i tend to buy onions like in bulk in a bag of you know five or six like three pounds of onions or i get them in my perfect box garlic i sometimes will buy the bulbs of garlic with several cloves inside or i might buy it already minced but i always have this stuff and then i'm using some salt and pepper i'm using some italian seasoning and i'm using some chicken broth based chicken bouillon would do just fine i'm also going to use a little bit of butter although i'm sure that another kind of cooking oil would probably suffice but i like the flavor that butter is going to give to these dishes in a pinch i'm sure just salt and pepper would go a very long way for some of these dishes but here are the things that i'm using that i did not purchase in my grocery haul so my total before tax at aldi was 9.59 so i came in 41 cents under budget but i did that on purpose because there's one ingredient that i did not purchase there because i'm going to make it from scratch and that is a can of cream of chicken soup and i have seen that anywhere between 40 and 50 cents a can at my aldi so if you want to pick up a can of that you can i typically don't use canned cream soups in my cooking anymore and if i'm using something like that i will just make it from scratch with a little bit of butter some milk some chicken broth and a little bit of flour and kind of make that creamy you know cream of chicken soup that i want for this recipe so i'll show you how how i do that but if you want to take the shortcut and just buy a can of cream of chicken you absolutely can i have cooked my chicken in the crock pot i just cut up an onion a carrot i peeled a few cloves of garlic and i had a lemon hanging out in my refrigerator that was you know kind of old and about to go bad and so i decided that i would use that as well you don't have to do that i was just trying to make good use of it and i stuffed the inside of the chicken with some of those things the onion the carrot the garlic the lemon and then what i couldn't fit inside i just put around the chicken on the bottom and then i seasoned it with italian seasoning and salt and pepper and i just let it cook on high in the crock pot for about six hours and it is fork tender now so i'm going to debone that i'm just going to take the meat off the bone but i'm going to save the broth that it produced already and i'm also going to save the carcass and the bones because i'm going to make more broth for another one of my recipes so let me show you what i'm making now so in this pot here i have made some homemade cream of chicken soup and i did that by melting about two tablespoons of butter and whisking in about two tablespoons of flour and then gradually adding in three quarters of a cup of milk and three quarters of a cup of chicken broth which i had from cooking my chicken i drained all the broth off and saved it so now i'm going to add about half of this container of sour cream this is a 16 ounce container and i need a cup which is eight ounces or half of this container and i'm just gonna whisk that into my cream of chicken soup i let it cool down a little bit if you are using canned cream of chicken soup that's fine too but you will probably want to just thin it out with a little bit of milk or water now in my casserole dish i have my package of frozen green beans and i also peeled and chopped four of my carrots don't worry i saved the peels in the ends and put them into the crock pot with the bones from my chicken because i can use those to make chicken broth and now i'm just spreading some of my chicken over the top of the vegetables here i want to use about a third of it and leave the other two thirds for the other two recipes and now i'm just gonna pour my sour cream and cream of chicken mixture over the top like that can i just say this smells amazing since i used the homemade chicken stock to make my homemade cream of chicken soup what was in the crock pot with the chicken all day long while it cooked oh my gosh it smells delicious and now i'm going to sprinkle my stuffing mix over the top of this and now this is the rest of my chicken broth that rendered whenever i was cooking my chicken and i am just going to pour that right over the top of the stuffing and try to get as much of the stuffing as possible um with the chicken broth so that the stuffing um has enough moisture to cook now when we are ready to eat this i'm just going to pop it into the oven at 350 and i'll probably cook it for about 30 minutes i'll let you know whenever it's finished i'm not sure if it's going to need 30 or 40 minutes i'll just kind of keep an eye on it and i'm going to be looking for it to start bubbling up but it smells absolutely delicious okay so i ended up baking this at 350 for about 40 minutes i checked on it at 30 minutes and i felt like the carrots weren't quite done i feel like it just wasn't quite done yet so i let it cook for another 10 minutes and i have already tried this and it's not much to look at but it is really good it's kind of like thanksgiving in a bowl or something like that and i think because i made you know the chicken from scratch you know what cooked the whole chicken in the crock pot and then used the broth from the crock pot to make like the homemade cream of chicken and then use that with the stuffing mix and that the flavor is just really really good so this is good and also my husband approved so yay in my crock pot here i have at the bottom you can't see them because they're covered up with stuff the bones from the chicken that i cooked yesterday and then i have the ends of the onions and carrots i've used so far plus an additional onion and carrot i have some just a little bit of salt and some cracked black pepper and then i have about two tablespoons of this broth base right here and two oh and i also put in several cloves of garlic they were little cloves i was kind of at the end of my bulb of garlic so i probably put six or seven little cloves of garlic in there i just put them in whole and now i'm gonna pour in about um two quarts or about eight cups of water if i'd have been thinking i would have started this last night and let it cook overnight on low but apparently i wasn't thinking so i'm gonna go ahead and put this on high i'm gonna let it cook on high for about five or six hours and then i will have broth for my dinner tonight and my dinner tomorrow i wanted to take a minute to address something because it inevitably comes up every time i post one of these videos and it has to do with the cost of goods where i live these videos tend to solicit comments sometimes about you know how much more expensive it is where somebody else lives or how cheap it is where i live and i wanted to just make a few points about that first of all the grass is not necessarily greener the cost of living in oklahoma is about 87 the national average in the united the st average people make less money so goods cost less money that's just part of how economics works it is very delicate and it is very complicated and i won't go into that because i'd be saying more than i know but the big point that i want to make is that the purpose of these videos at least for me and making them is to give inspiration and ideas so perhaps this budget would not work where you are i i don't you know entertain at all the idea that this budget would work everywhere in the u.s let alone everywhere in the world but what i'm hoping is that it will maybe make you think about what you are spending per meal and challenge yourself to maybe shave just a little bit off that on occasion so if you are spending ten dollars per meal maybe you could challenge yourself to spend nine dollars per meal or if you typically spend a thousand dollars a month in groceries maybe you would challenge yourself to only spend 950 because that would be a five percent reduction in your grocery bill and maybe some of the things that i'm doing just give some ideas you know maybe somebody out there has never thought about actually making a whole chicken and not only using the chicken across multiple meals the meat from the chicken but then reusing the bones and the scraps from the vegetables to make chicken broth which is something that they don't have to buy in their grocery haul so again it's just about inspiration and ideas and i just wanted to point that out i know you guys hate it too whenever i give disclaimers but it's something that keeps coming up in all of my videos that i've really wanted to address that really this is about inspiration ideas and you don't always know what a person's situation is so even though it may seem like gosh everything's really inexpensive um you know this is where i live and this is where i have to shop to make my videos so this is the threshold of spending that i've set for myself with these videos but it might look a little bit different for you my broth is done now and i have set aside about a cup of it because i want it for the third recipe that i'm going to make and then the onions and garlic and carrots i have put in my little ninja blender because i'm going to puree them and use them in the chicken noodle soup that i'm going to make with the rest of this broth so i'm going to go ahead and run it through the strainer into the pot that i'm going to use to make the soup and i'll show you how i'm doing that to make my chicken noodle soup i did strain the broth from the crock pot i wanted to make sure there weren't any stray bones in it into another pot that i can put on the stove and i am adding a little bit more cracked black pepper and about a teaspoon or so of italian seasoning and maybe about half a teaspoon or so of salt i know there's salt already in it from the broth base that i used but i'm just putting a little bit more in there to give the soup a little bit more flavor i'm going to bring this up to a boil and then i'm going to add one carrot that i peeled and chopped i'm going to let that carrot cook on its own for about 10 minutes or so because it takes the carrot longer to cook than it does the noodles that i'm about to put in the pot i only used one carrot because i didn't want to have an overwhelming carrot flavor given the fact that i'm using this vegetable puree which i'm putting in right now these are the vegetables that cooked in the crock pot with the broth so i just put them into my ninja blender and blended them all together so i'm adding those back into the pot with the carrots after the carrots have cooked for 10 minutes on their own and i'm going to add about a third of my bag of egg noodles it only takes about five to six ounces for this soup and then i'm adding half of the chicken that i have left that is already cooked i'm gonna bring that up to a simmer and let the noodles cook for about seven to eight minutes or so and then this soup will be done and this turned out absolutely amazing i think partly because again there's so much stuff that is made from scratch in here i mean the chicken i made from scratch and the broth i made from scratch and then i used the vegetables from the broth puree to kind of help enhance the flavor of the soup and doesn't it just look so delicious i mean it's got this really vibrant color my husband came in and tried this for me before i served it and he his face just kind of lit up he was like that is amazing that is some really good soup so that's high praise from him indeed and i know that this may not seem like you know a super hearty meal but it was very filling and obviously you can dress this up however you like it i had some bread hanging out in the freezer i feel like i always have the ends of various kinds of bread either in my bread basket or the freezer so this is a good opportunity just to toast some of that up and have it alongside a nice bowl of soup which was really delicious on kind of a rainy spring day tonight i am making what i hope is going to be a very simple chicken stroganoff type of dish so let me take you down to the stove and i'll show you what i'm up to all right so over here i have my egg noodles already cooking these are the rest of the egg noodles that i did not use in the chicken noodle soup and then on the stove here i have some onions that i have sauteed and about three tablespoons of butter and i let them saute on their own for about three or four minutes and then i added a little bit of minced garlic and they've been sauteing another two minutes or so and now i'm going to add about three tablespoons of flour and it makes sort of a paste you want it to soak up all of that butter and now i have my chicken broth that i saved that i made yesterday for the chicken noodle soup i saved about a cup of that broth from yesterday and i'm just going to pour this into the pan and let it come to a simmer and it's going to thicken up a little bit add a little salt and pepper so after a couple minutes my sauce has thickened up really nicely as you can see and now i'm going to add the rest of my chicken and the rest of my sour cream because i only used half of it in the stuffing casserole that i made the other night and i'm just going to stir that all together and keep the heat on low i'll probably add just a little bit of water because i think it's thickened up just a tad too much but i want the chicken and the sour cream to heat through with the sauce that i made and then i will have something delicious to put over the top of the noodles which i just drained and they are waiting for me to assemble my plate i'm going to thin this out just a little bit i got it just a tad too thick i still had three carrots left from my two pound bag of carrots so i chopped them up and put them at the bottom of this pan and then i added this can of green beans and i did not drain them i just poured them in there and i put about a tablespoon of butter and some extra salt and pepper in there and i'm going to bring that to a simmer and then the carrots will basically cook in the juice from the green beans and then the butter and the salt and pepper will add a little extra flavor so that we can have a side of vegetables with our dinner tonight and here is dinner tonight it turned out great i have my green beans and my carrots over here on the side and then i have my stroganoff here a pretty hefty portion of noodles and stroganoff sauce and this turned out really really good i've already tasted it and it's wonderful my husband also tasted it and said it's great so i'm looking forward to diving into this yummy okay you guys that is what i have for you i hope that it was helpful and inspiring and gives you some ideas i really cannot choose my favorite of these dishes i like them all they all turned out even better than i thought they would maybe because i made the chicken from scratch and then continued to use the ingredients to make things from scratch it just all seemed so flavorful and we really enjoyed all of these meals thank you so much for watching and i will be sure to check in with another video very soon you

Channel: See Mindy Mom

Views: 91,291

Rating: 4.9528427 out of 5

Keywords: extreme budget meals, extreme budget cooking, budget, frugal, extreme budget meal plan, cheap meals, cheap family meals, cook with me, what's for dinner, extreme budget, extreme budget grocery haul, frugal meals, frugal dinners, extreme budget dinners, $5 dinners, $4 dinners, $3 dinners

Id: k0EXCdb0VjM

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021