How to Eat for $10 a Week | Dollar Tree Budget Meal Plan | Emergency Grocery Haul

hey friends and welcome to my channel to get straight to the point of today's video i'm going to be spending an entire week eating nothing but ten dollars of dollar tree groceries the dollar tree may not seem like the most ideal place to buy groceries for some people that's just what they have access to i have an uncle who doesn't drive and we're from a really rural town so the dollar tree is where he does his grocery shopping now most of you are probably watching this video because you're just curious about how i'm going to make ten dollars of groceries last me an entire week or maybe you're trying to slim down your own grocery budget and are just looking for ideas but if you are watching this video because you're struggling please reach out to the resources around you whether that be government programs or local food pantries or even just your friends and neighbors i remember back when i was struggling i would say to myself no i don't need those resources i'm gonna save them for people who actually need them and guess what i was trying to spend twenty dollars a week feeding two adults i was the people who needed them there's never any shame in reaching out for help that's what those resources are there for so today is tuesday i'm gonna run this challenge from wednesday night until the following wednesday lunch now i will actually be eating these groceries every day for the entire week so at the end of the week i'll let you know how it went and how realistic i feel like it actually is without any further ado i hope you enjoy the rest of the video here we are at our friendly neighborhood dollar tree i figured we'd do a brief tour for those who may not be familiar with their grocery offerings the first stop i made was to the bread section which was fairly cleaned out next was condiments which they pretty much carried anything and everything of their can section include a variety of different vegetables beans pastas and meats then it is the baking items and i had to remind myself that i won't feel great attempting to survive a week on brownies and cake and then finally it is the foundation of a 10 diet rice and dried beans now we come to the freezer section which really is a game changer in dollar tree grocery shopping they have milk chocky milk juices eggs and cheeses one thing to note is that they have these shreds which are a pasteurized processed topping but then they also have these small blocks of real cheese they have cream cheese and sour cream like products as well as your processed meat products lunchables lunch meats hot dogs etc then comes various breakfast items most notable are the frozen meats at the bottom of the freezer especially the very frozen as you can see ground sausage they have a pretty impressive variety of frozen vegetables including cauliflower rice asparagus and steamable bags what i always find most intriguing is the frozen seafood fillets at the bottom next is your standard frozen chicken products tenders patties nuggies and then at the bottom is a variety of burgers both turkey and beef and that's item number 10. all right so here's a quick recap of everything i got so i got the frozen pepper stir fry veggie 14 ounce bag i got the mixed veggies carrots onions peas and green beans that is a 14 ounce bag or some of the bigger bags of frozen vegetables that they had i got one pound bag of lentils one pound bag of pinto beans a two pound bag of white rice a dozen eggs eight ounces of extra value meats beef patties with cheddar and bacon flavor they also had regular ones but i kind of don't know my both cheddar and bacon might go nice for breakfast which is what i got for um they sell a seven ounce tube here of pork sausage i got some chicken bouillon because flavor is important to me and we're working on limited flavors and i have a pack here of 12 flour tortillas tonight is the night with the most prep work i'm gonna have all week so i'm gonna go ahead and get this started i almost forgot about oil and spices so i didn't want to go crazy in my spice cabinet because i do like heavily spicing my food so i do have quite an array of spices but um i thought for the purposes of a challenge like this would be better to go simple so i'm sticking with salt pepper garlic powder hot sauce soy sauce and vegetable oil and so that's the extent of oil and spices that i'm going to be using there's going to be nothing else coming out of my pantry spice cabinet refrigerator anything for the rest of the week this is it before i get started i wanted to give you guys a brief overview of what my meal plan is going to look like for the week i tried to include as much variety as was realistic for the ingredients and time that i had all right first thing i want to do is get a look at this uh pepper stir-fry and by the way ignore you know i swear my counter is clean uh it's i don't know if older laminate countertops staying easier or what but i've tried literally everything on it redoing our counters in some way is on my to-do list it's just one of the many many many many many many projects that we have not gotten all right not bad so i do want to go ahead and chop these down a little bit i'm honestly really not concerned about uniform pieces or anything like that i just want them in slightly smaller pieces so that way it's just a little bit easier to distribute in my two dishes that they're gonna go in these ones i'm gonna put back in the bag for the breakfast that i'm gonna make and then these ones are going into my rice and beans the first thing i'm going to do is get these pinto beans started i like to cook a lot of them all at once and once cooked they can easily be stored in the freezer cans of beans at the dollar tree were a dollar which is much more expensive than my regular grocery store and i'm gonna get several cans worth out of this one bag so what i'm doing here is just spreading the beans out so it's easy to look through them i'm just looking for broken beans rocks and anything that just doesn't look like it's supposed to be there here's my little haul of stuff i removed including what looks like a kernel of corn next i'm just transferring my beans into a colander so i can give them a quick rinse in the sink after rinsing i'm just going to go ahead and dump my pinto beans into my instant pot and add two quarts of water as well as some of the chicken bouillon that i bought then this goes into my instant pot and i'm gonna set it for 25 minutes you could of course also do this on the stove but if you do have a pressure cooker or even a slow cooker it's way more hands-off and leaves you time to do other things than watching a pot on the stove next i'm going to go ahead and get started on my rice i'm going to go ahead and cook two cups of my dried rice tonight and i'm going to divide that evenly between the two different dishes that i'm making tonight so half will go in my rice and lentils dish and the other half is going to go in my rice and pinto beans dish the rest of this rice is getting set aside and i will be cooking it on sunday so i always do rinse my rice you'll notice at first that the water is really cloudy and starchy so i just give it a rinse a couple times until it runs a little bit clear it doesn't take long to do and it does improve the finished product if you're noticing the orange tape wrapped around my faucet well all i can say about that is be careful with your cast iron if the two are pitted against each other the cast iron will win every time once rinsed i'm going to go ahead and get that rice going in my rice cooker it's as simple as popping the insert in and hitting the white rice button you could of course do this as well on a stove it's just that i have these appliances and i like to make my my minions here do my bidding for me because i'm doing so much cooking tonight i'm gonna go simple with my breakfast for thursday and friday so i'm just making some hard-boiled eggs two each for thursday and friday for my rice and pinto beans dish i'm gonna start out by putting some oil in my pan and letting that heat up then i'm gonna go ahead and add in my frozen vegetable mix which were onions and peppers i'm going to go ahead and saute these until i get some beautiful browning on those onions at which point i'm going to go ahead and set them to the side in my pan so that way i can add in my pinto beans i added in a little over half the beans i made including some of the liquid that they were cooked in especially since i did add bouillon to that liquid so it should be good and flavorful once my beans are added i'm going to go ahead and mash those up a little bit and once my beans reach a consistency i like i'm going to go ahead and add some spices we have salt pepper and of course garlic we are not stingy with garlic in this household i started mixing everything together and then realized that because i was going to be adding a bunch of rice to this i actually probably wanted my beans to be a little bit thinner so i went ahead and added a couple more cups of liquid from the pot of beans and then stirred everything together really well i tasted what i had so far and decided to go ahead and add another packet of chicken bouillon after stirring that in it was time to add the rice i added half the rice from my rice cooker and then i mixed everything together until the rice was thoroughly mixed in this dish tasted great and it was time to move on to my rice and lentils i started my rice and lentils dish by setting my instant pots to saute function and adding my ground sausage which i had allowed to thaw in the refrigerator i have to admit i'm not really a fan of the saute function in the instant pot i think it just gets too hot and i've had just so many problems in the past with getting burn notices after using it i'm also not a fan of how the pot can kind of spin around freely it's kind of a pain and i don't like draining the grease but anyway i'm done complaining about the saute function it did work out just fine for this recipe once my sausage was fully cooked i went ahead and added some water and made sure that i thoroughly scraped up the bottom of the pot making sure that no bits were stuck to it because like i said i don't want to get a burn notice then i added the rest of my water i think i added two and a half or three cups total then i went ahead and added my lentils i added one cup which was about half of the bag for seasoning i added two packets of the chicken bouillon that i had gotten followed by some garlic some black pepper i gave it a good stir and then went ahead and put the lid on and set it for 15 minutes under high pressure then i almost immediately had to stop it because i realized i had forgotten to put in my frozen veggies so i went ahead and added half of that bag of frozen mixed mixed vegetables pop the lid back on and went for round two by the way i totally forgot to record myself making the rice and bean tortilla that i made for dinner i also forgot to take a short video of what it looked like when it was completed before i started eating it but i'm just going to let you know that it was absolutely delicious and i look forward to eating more of these this week once the timer went off i went ahead and let my pressure cooker natural release for about 10 minutes before pulling the rice and lentils out at which point i added the rice and stirred that thoroughly in i had a taste and decided that it was just a little bit bland so went ahead and added some extra salt pepper and garlic i gave that a good stir and then it was time to go ahead and portion them out for my lunches for the week thursday and fridays will go right in the fridge while monday tuesday and wednesdays will go in the freezer and i'll just pull them out the night before or the day before that i'm going to take them in you'll see in the back there i've got my extra pinto beans ready to go in the fridge i went ahead and put some soy sauce on top of each dish and then pop the lids on and then they were also ready to go in the fridge and once cooled down the three for next week will go in the freezer all right so i went ahead and let my cast iron heat up for a couple minutes because it takes forever to heat up on this glass stove top i'm gonna add a little bit of oil into my pan [Applause] and then add the rest of the frozen veggies that were left in that bag all right finally starting to get some color on these the only thing i don't really love about frozen veggies it feels like they hold a lot more water and it takes a lot longer to get some nice color on them i'm going to call this good enough to go ahead and get my burger meat in here so i'm going to push all of this over to the cooler side of my pan out of the way let's see how this burger meat is it does say that it's an uncooked product the ingredients do say beef is the first product and it doesn't list any pork or chicken i'm gonna kind of break these up as i go since we don't actually want patties we want something closer and groundy so this actually smells pretty good it's the uh the bacon flavoring is primarily what's what's coming through as far as how it smells so it almost smells like i'm cooking up a pan of bacon so while that meat finishes doing its thing i'm gonna go ahead and break four of my eggs into a bowl watch me absolutely mangle it and then i'm just going to go ahead and give that a nice little stir nice little whisk if you will so i did go ahead and stir the veggies back in with the meat and it actually smells really good like i didn't really have i mean i went into it kind of with no expectations about dollar tree hamburgers you know eight ounces of hamburger for a dollar um but it smells really good at the very least this is pretty much ready for the egg to go in letting the pan cool down just a little bit before i add it and taste the little piece of this the bacon and cheese flavoring is definitely what dominates that for sure if i was doing a blind taste test i'd probably think it was sausage over hamburger but it's going in a breakfast burrito so i am not complaining i'm going to add a little bit of a little bit of garlic to this and a little bit of pepper i do not think it needs any sauce we'll see a little my of salt when i add the eggs in but definitely no salt for this thing meat is definitely browning up really nicely all right i'm gonna go ahead and dump my egg in now [Music] all right now i'm just gonna go ahead and stir everything together of these eggs finish cooking and i'm going to add a little salt to it the egg definitely tempered down for that salty flavor give that one last little stir here okay one two trace quattro see if i can do this without making an absolute mess oh nope let's see if i can actually get these things closed don't judge me for my tortilla rolling abilities okay there's two down and last one oops nobody saw that i might be just making room in the tortilla and there we go i'm not winning any awards at a burrito rolling but all right all right and this is how they turned out i'm pretty happy with them they got some nice coloring on them i'm about to taste them and see what that's like uh three of them as soon as they cool down i'm gonna wrap them up in foil and then those are gonna be my breakfast for monday tuesday wednesday at work all right let's try this it's pretty hot still like i said the bacon cheddar taste is really what comes through on it crisping the tortilla up definitely the right move for my lunches for today and tomorrow that being saturday and sunday i'm gonna have refried bean tortillas so to get this started i'm gonna add some oil to a pan and let that heat up then i'm going to add my pinto beans that i made the other day for seasoning i'm going to add some salt some pepper and some garlic next i'm going to mash them and then i'm going to let that liquid cook down a bit if i could add a little less bean juice to this but oh well it'll simmer out [Music] wouldn't that be a good facial oh you're talking about the steam from the rice cooker i'm like going up against the top okay uh you gonna put that on goop i mean it is almost literal goop here we go now we're we're working up to a good texture here now we're cooking with goop um [Applause] i'm let this cool down for a minute so i don't burn myself but it smells good and it looks good and i've been snacking on some of the beans by the spoonful and i am excited to eat this all right it's probably cooled down where i'm not gonna burn myself either way it's a risk i'm willing to take because i'm hungry and it smells good i'm not sure so [Music] all right my rice is done so i'm gonna grab myself a bowl this is rice both for breakfast and what's gonna go for dinner um so i'm gonna grab myself this is a big pot of rice about a cup for now some of y'all are gonna be grossed out by this but if you are you could just pretend it's a fried egg or a poached egg but i'm just gonna take one of my eggs here and crack it right into that rice and then give it a nice stir in there and you definitely want your rice to be fresh and hot if you do this maybe even a bigger bowl so you don't make a giant mess like i do all right and so the rest of this rice is going to come out and cool down for a little bit before it goes into the fridge so that way we can make some fried rice later i'm just going to add some pepper because i like me some pepper and then some soy sauce perfect so i have here my rice and egg and it is looking delicious it's good all right here is my final meal that i'm actually gonna have to be making this is gonna cover my dinners for tonight so that's sunday monday and tuesday to finish out the week um so what i did was i went ahead and i whisked up my final three eggs from my dozen i'm gonna go ahead and pour this into my pan i love eggs it was so easy to go through a dozen of them if i had another dollar i probably would have considered a second carton of eggs as an option i'm gonna go ahead and season these with just a little bit of salt and pepper now now i'm going to go ahead and get these out of the pan and into a bowl for the time being [Music] my eggs probably wouldn't have stuck but i think i probably put my heat up a little high i'm going to go ahead and get what's left of my mixed vegetables in there i'm going to go ahead and this is everything that's left of those beans that i cooked those pinto beans i cooked up earlier in the week i know pinto beans are not a traditional egg fried rice addition don't come at me but we waste not want not we're using up what we have now that everything is all heated up i have all this rice that i made earlier and it's been in the fridge all day and hopefully it all fits in the pan i'm gonna go ahead and add it in a little bit at a time all right i'm just going to toss some oops i already shaved y'all i'm gonna toss some pepper over this whole thing [Applause] what i had in here was uh some soy sauce water and at the risk of it being too salty one of the chicken boy on packages just because i was thinking it's a lot of rice for me to flavor all right go ahead and add my eggs which uh seem abysmally low quantity in all this rice but it's okay it's gonna taste good and it's gonna fill my stomach and that's all that matters i will say though for three meals i mean this looks like very very large dinners for three dinners i mean like i don't know if you can really get a sense for how deep this pan is but i mean it's it's a lot of food it's a lot of rice you know it may not be a lot of everything else in it but it is a lot of rice i'm not going to be going to bed hungry pretty good it's actually not that salty so i'm gonna go ahead and add a bit more soy sauce to it as well as i'm going to add some hot sauce to this [Music] let's see if i can get that all mixed without knocking half of it out of the pan [Music] i will tell y'all one thing i'm a good cook i am a messy cook i think that is good i think we are good to go on this so i'm gonna have a giant bowl just for dinner and then giant bowls of this for the next two dinners and it's actually kind of nice thinking forward that i am done cooking for the rest of the week all right so i went ahead and i filled this bowl pretty dang full and it is not even a third of the pan yet so we'll see if i can even eat a third of it if not it'll be an after work snack all right so it's wednesday night we made it through the week and i have a few quick takeaways i want to talk about before we end the video so first is the question of was it enough food and the answer to that isn't a straightforward yes or no i estimated the total calories including the oil i was adding and i landed somewhere around 1400 calories a day i'm sure and i sit at a desk all day i typically eat 15 or 1600 calories a day to maintain my weight anyway so 1400 wasn't really a noticeable drop if i were six feet tall or if i were an athlete that would never be enough so the short answer yes it was enough for me but no it might not be enough for anybody else the second question becomes how is the food i honestly liked everything that i ate i did not eat anything that i didn't like i didn't even eat anything that i only kind of liked so really the only downside to eating this way for a week was that there was a lot of foods that i was missing i was missing fresh vegetables i was missing just fresh food in general so what did you guys think of how i chose to use my ten dollars is that what you would have bought would you have done anything different let me know in the comments if you want to see more of these videos hit that subscribe button hit the like button so that i know you enjoyed it and i'll see you next time

Channel: That Lisa Dawn

Views: 1,608,083

Keywords: $10 week groceries, 10 dollar food budget, cheap food, dollar food shopping, eat for 10 a week, eat for 10 dollars a week, eating on a budget, extreme budget, food for 10 a week, food shopping, food stamps, groceries for 10 a week, grocery haul, how to eat for $10 a week, how to live on 10 dollars a week, live on 10 a week, snap, dollar tree haul, budget meals, dollar tree, dollar tree grocery haul, dollar tree meals, budget shopping, frugal, frugal living, eat for cheap

Id: wJcR_tmbKEM

Length: 30min 26sec (1826 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021