How many meals can I create with 50 dollars?

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Soula Stainless Steel 2 TBSP Cookie Scoop: https://amzn.to/3hKvwyl
Cosori Air Fryer: https://amzn.to/3szPZkE
Hex Clad 8 inch Non Stick Pan: https://amzn.to/47AjnXa
Lodge 6 QT Cast iron pot; https://amzn.to/3uT8tNr
9×13 Baking dish: https://amzn.to/4a8K0Uu
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50 Dollar Grocery List: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16E4wEtjCiEUkFbqJgzMYAbOCiXXf72kk/view?usp=sharing

00:00 – Intro
01:48 – White Bread
03:06 – Flour Tortillas
04:15 – Butternut Squash Muffins
05:50 – Twice Fried Plantains
06:55 – Thrive Market
08:06 – Spanish Torta
10:25 – Crispy Beef Butternut Squash Soup
12:23 – Fresh Slaw
13:04 – Guacamole
13:29 – Taco Filling
14:55 – Coconut Oatmeal
15:32 – Coconut French Toast
16:25 – Zesty Yogurt Sauce
16:44 – Mac and Cheese

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Music Credits:
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Video Credits
Creator, Host, Co-Editor – Mike G
Editor – Christopher Pressler
Assistant Editor – Cooper Makohon
Motion Graphics – Raphael Oliveira

So I’ve created my own cooking competition show which is sort of like chopped but with the goal of being a little bit more realistic for home Cooks but the kicker is I’m the only contestant on this show and all of you are the judges now the way this

Competition works is I pick out $50 worth of ingredients nothing specialty here all basic food items that you can find in a standard grocery store and my task is to see how many delicious meals I can create with just these $50 worth of ingredients then your job as the

Judges is to rate my performance on a scale of 1 to 10 one being absolute trash you hated everything I made to 10 being very impressed even Blown Away by all of the dishes I put forth in this video and please do not hold back I want

You to be very honest with your score now some reason you want my full grocery breakdown I’ve linked it below so here are the $50 worth of ingredients I chose for this Challenge and one good tip I’ll throw out there is when you’re doing a challenge like this and you’re on a

Restricted budget you want to have at least a cuisine in mind that can help guide your recipes because that way you’ll have a lot of crossover with ingredients and you’ll have a much easier time using all of your ingredients and not wasting anything which is the goal here and I chose

Mexican cuisine as just the rough inspiration not all of the meals will be Mexican inspired but a few of the dishes will be so this is all of the produce right here that I can use today here are all of the pantry items and then finally

My meat eggs and Dairy are right here in this budget I won’t be including the pantry Staples of oil salt and pepper and I also saved about 50 for just some spices because I definitely wasn’t wasting like $5 on a whole thing of cinnamon when I’m just using say pennies

Worth all right ground rolles done let the games begin I started this challenge off just making a few baked goods right away one because they take the longest to make and also once I have them they’ll set me up for other meals down the line so I have this single bag of

White whole wheat flowers it’s 32 oz or 2 lb I’m going to use about half of it to make an overnight white bread loaf so I’ve got 500 G of flour plus a pinch of yeast which I’m not including in the cost just a few cents then salt and

Water at about 75% hydration water is free I’ll stir that up and I won’t take you through the entire bread making process in detail I just released an entire video on this I’m pretty much following my standard sourdough bread making techniques but everything is just sped up a bit since I’m using baker’s

Yeast and not natural sourdough starter Once the dough has doubled inside I’m going to shape it up I gave it a dip in some sesame seeds and I popped the dough in a little bread tin to proof overnight in the fridge and in the morning it was

Nicely puffed up and ready for the oven I baked it at 425° F for about 35 minutes until it was just Perfect and now that we have white bread well there are plenty of options moving forward so with Mexican Cuisine in mind I wanted to dedicate a lot of this flour to some flour tortillas I am going to save about one cup of it for a baked

Good coming up and the rest will be going to these tortillas which I used roughly about 3 cups of flour half a teaspoon of baking powder a few tablespoons of oil some warm water and salt and I kneaded that dough for around 3 to 4 minutes adding flour until it

Felt like a nice soft dough kind of like a Play-Doh consistency maybe slightly softer than that and once that dough was feeling good I let it rest for 15 minutes then I divided the dough up into little pieces I shaped those into balls let those rest for another 15 minutes

And started rolling them out super thin to get them ready for the Planta nice oh these flow tortillas are amazing So by now you know that whenever I’m meal prepping for the week I’m always making baked goods it is a staple for my family and 90% of the time the baked goods have bananas or ripe bananas as the base which I don’t have available in this challenge so instead I’m going to

Start taking advantage of this butternut squash that I have so the first thing I did was get it prepped up by peeling off the skin chopping it in half and then deeding it then I took that bottom half where the seeds were and I sliced that

Up into a few pieces and got that steaming for around 10 to 15 minutes until it was nice and soft I added those soft pieces of butternut squash to a mixing bowl I mashed them up nice and smooth as my base I added a few scoops

Of Greek yogurt two eggs and a little bit of that coconut milk which I’m going to start tapping into then I added two tablespoons of sugar again not on the list but I wasn’t buying a full bag of sugar for this challenge just to use maybe 15 cents of

It but these muffins needed some additional sweetness outside of the squash then I added some lemon zest for my one lemon some rolled oats and then I ended up using the rest of the flour to get a nice muffin batter I scoop that into some muffin tins bake these at 350°

F for around 18 to 19 minutes until they read just about 200° internal whenever I’m freestyle baking I always use a thermometer or you can use the wooden toothpick method but you got to check yourself because there’s no recipe to go off and these came out really nice the

Butternut squash gave them a very unique flavor that I wasn’t used to in a Bak good and they were definitely a big hit at home you got your muffin you like all right moving out of Bak Goods we’ve got a nice base there and I wanted to fry up these plantains

Now these are sweet plantains theen green ones that you find in the market are the starchier plantains that are good for like a crispy chip and what I do with these is I twice fry them or twice air fry them you save on a ton of

Oil and you still get a really delicious final product so I just slice them up into bigger chunks I get them in the air fryer and just give them a spray and I threw them in at 375° F for around 8 to 9 minutes to start and then I leave them

Right in the air fryer just like this and I just smush them directly in the air fryer with a fork and then FL flip them over to give them a spray on the less brown side and then back in the air fryer at the same temperature for just

About 5 more minutes and these come out nice and golden brown they’re crispy on the exterior but they’re still mushy and sweet and delicious on that interior and these are a huge hit with my kids they already love bananas these are pretty much like fried bananas great little

Side dish great little snack I make them all the time all right before I keep cruising on this challenge I wanted to take a minute to tell you about today’s sponsor which is thrive Market which is actually driving a lot of these meals today Drive Market is an online

Membership based grocery store on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone and I’ve been shopping with Thrive market for years now and there’s a few things that keep me coming back number one is that you can get everything you need in one place they have an amazing selection of

Organic groceries and snacks they also have a really great selection of non-toxic and organic personal care and Beauty items and I love this experience of being able to shop for all of these things in one place and orders above $49 shipped for free and are delivered in carbon neutral shipping from Thrive zero

Waste warehouses so all of this packaging here gets composted and I’m a big fan of zero waste it’s kind of the point of this video so I really appreciate thrives mission to become the world’s first climate positive grocery store and there’s different price plans for the membership you can do $12 for a

Monthly membership or $5 a month for a yearly membership so if you’re interested click the link below in the description or go to thrivemarket.com prohome cooks for 30% off your first order and a free gift worth up to $60 if you join Thrive market today so I was

Making a good den on the ingredients but then I saw the potatoes and onions just staring at me right on the countertop and the first thing I thought was Spanish Tora because that dish is the absolute greatest use of potatoes onions and eggs all of which I have in

Abundance right now and there’s lots of techniques out there for this dish this is my own personal version that’s pretty simple to pull off at home I started off by slicing up two small potatoes very thin which is important to help them cook quickly and get nice and soft and

Then I sliced up some onion pretty much the same size as the potatoes and I got a little 8 in pan on a burner added a good bit of oil a traditional recipe uses so much more oil but then you have to do something with that excess oil so

I’m just doing a little shallow fry here and I fried these up until they were super soft which took around 10 minutes while the potatoes and onions were cooking I cracked all of my eggs in a bowl and whisk them up so the potatoes and onions pretty nice Brown here

They’re super soft I’m just going to Salt them a bit get those a mix I like where that’s at turn this off I’m going to pour off all that excess oil we don’t need that right now and now we take these warm potatoes pop the warm

Potatoes in the cold egg and just give that a mix don’t put the pan on there idiot and the warm potato start to just lightly set the eggs let this sit for like AE minut it clean out the pan back on the heat add some of that reserved

Oil all right now eggs back in pull in the sides like you’re making an omelette pick my cheese block I’ll grate some cheese this is optional everything’s optional really all right so outside is hooked and getting Brown inside’s super runny going to take a plate here we go

Hope for the best okay that worked now we have to just slpy dippy back in trying to get all that egg we’ll just tuck in those Sid give it a few Twirls just to get some even cooking you want it nice and moist on the inside like a medium rare steak

That’s what we’re going for you don’t want to go well done on this I’m going to pull it now boom my version of a Spanish tort so I was feeling pretty good at this point but I needed to make a bigger dent in all of these remaining

Ingredients so I decided to make a soup and don’t tune out right when I say soup most people think soup is like old people food but knowing how to make really good soup with proper techniques I think is mandatory for every home cook especially in the cold months so I’m

Making a crispy beef and butternut squash soup first I added some oil to a pot then I’m using a little over half of this ground beef I’ll be saving the rest for something else and I just started rendering that beef down and while that was cooking I chopped up my aromatics

Which in this case is just carrots onions and garlic now most most people stop cooking ground beef at this point right here when it’s gray and just cook through because they don’t realize that you can get ground beef crispy like a burger you just got to keep rendering

Keep cooking and you can develop so much more flavor like at this point right here when my beef is crispy I’ll scoop that out leaving the residual oil get those aromatics in there and just cook them down until they’re nice and soft and sweet and the base of the soup is

Going to be the final two potatoes and almost the rest of that butternut squash I peeled the potatoes up chopped them into small cubes and then chopped up the butternut squash pretty much the same size once those aromatics were looking nice and sexy I added some salt in there

And then Ingo the potatoes and the Squash I covered it with water because I didn’t have stock but you can use stock and then I let that cook until everything was nice and soft and then this is my favorite technique for soup of all time it’s the ultimate soup hat I

Take my immersion blender you can do this with a regular blender and I do a half blend blend so you get kind of The Best of Both Worlds you get a little chunky you get some smooth creamy I personally love this texture for soup

And after that all I had to do was add back my beef a little bit of chopped cilantro some lemon juice just to kick things up a bit and then salt and pepper to season and I served that up with some of the fresh bread and oh what a good

Winter soup this was all right next to balance out these meals I needed some freshness so I’m bringing out that cabbage which is the best budget piece of produce of all time I’m turning this into a very simple SLO I make this all the time I just chopped it in half

Razzled dazzled right through this cabbage chopped up some cilantro pretty roughly threw that into a mixing bowl and then I took a few carrots peeled those directly into the mixing bowl and to season I took one clove of garlic grated that in I cut two wedges of lemon

Squeezed those in a little drizzle of olive oil seasoned it up with some salt and pepper and just really gave that a good mix and boom you you’ve got a beautiful SLO good just to eat like this as a salad or potential tacos speaking of tacos we got the flow tortillas we

Got the SLO I decided to turn the one avocado I had into guac avocado goes into a bowl I had about a third of an onion left over I just diced that up nice and fine and then I chopped up some cilantro and I used lemon juice because

That’s what I had which I find is still delicious in guac if that’s all you have don’t be riant on the lime if you don’t have it and then I mash that up and boom there’s guacamole now to round out these tacos I needed a good filling and there

Wasn’t a ton of options with what I had left but I can still get as creative as possible so I’m using the rest of the ground beef and I’ll just get that in some oil to start rendering off and to bulk this filling up a little bit I’m

Pretty much using all of the produce I have left so I’m going to chop up some carrots chop up the last of my onion and then two cloves of garlic and just a piece of this cabbage I don’t need to use it all and then I cooked the ground

Beef until it was pretty crispy but everything is going on top of it so it’s going to continue to cook and get more crispy once all the veggies were in there I seasoned them up with salt and there was enough residual oil to just cook these down until they were soft and

Delicious which took around 5 to 7 minutes now I actually meant to order dried black beans for this challenge which for me whenever I’m doing a budget challenge dried beans just go such a far away but I ordered these pre-cooked black beans which cost around $2 so I’m

Not going to get as much for my money with these but it sure was really nice to just pop those right in and be done with it without any soaking and pre-cooking I just added a little bit of water on top of this mixture seasoned it

Up nicely and just cooked it down for another few minutes until I had a beautiful Taco filling and let me tell you these tacos with what I had were absolutely delicious I need to make flow tortillas more often that should be a staple just like bread making in my meal

Prep so we’ve got more ingredients and I wanted to make a few more breakfast items so the first thing thing I did was make a coconut oatmeal I still had a bunch of the oats left so I just added those to a saucepan with about a third

Of the can of coconut milk for flavor and then the rest was just water I seasoned that up with some cinnamon a little bit of vanilla extract and the smallest hit of salt and I did give it a little extra sweetness of 2 tbspoon of sugar and I just cooked down the oats

Until they were nice and thick and for me this is just a family meal prep staple now here’s a fun breakfast item for you that came about because of the ingredients I had left coconut French toast added the final two eggs some of that coconut milk and again for

Seasoning just a little bit of cinnamon and some vanilla extract I whisked that up dunked in those beautiful bread slices and they just soaked up that coconut custard so nicely and I buttered up a skillet and got those frying off red toast everyone loves coconut French

Toast all right we are down to just these ingredients right here I’ve made a pretty good dent and at this point this is where all the rules of cooking get thrown out well you still can rely on your Technique but you got to get creative if you don’t want to waste food

Which is the whole point of all of this really I hate wasting food which is why I love these challenges so the first thing I decided on was taking that tiny bit of yogurt left adding the rest of my lemon juice I added a little bit of

Cilantro and some salt to season and then I just mix this up for a nice little zesty yogurt sauce that I actually popped on top of the Spanish Tora for a nice little complete breakfast I almost forgot I did use a good chunk of that cheese to make some

Grilled cheese sandwiches for my kids but I still had a big chunk of that cheese left so everything else was put into making a mac and cheese for my final dish since I had that pasta that penet and that’s the first thing I did I

Got a pot of water boiling and I popped in those noodles I also had a little piece of butternut squash left and I threw that in with the noodles to boil together to add some extra flavor and just bulk things up of it I got some garlic cooking away in some olive oil

And I added on about 2 tspoons of flour and I was very disappointed at this point that I didn’t save just a tablespoon or two of flour to make a rof for this cheese sauce everything would have just worked out out so perfectly but I had to bring in the backup and I

Cooked down that flour in the oil for about 2 minutes and then in went the rest of the coconut milk along with some water to get that perfect consistency which I heated up to get it nice and thick and then I season this up and grated the rest of that cheese and that

Went right into the sauce to melt down and then when the pasta and squash was done cooking I added on that cheese sauce mixed everything up and then check this out I took my final garlic clove final bit of fresh cilantro and my final bread slice I threw that into a food

Processor until it created a bread crumb got that frying off and a little bit of olive oil just to start that crispiness process and then Top This mac and cheese with a garlic cilantro breadcrumb bake that off in the oven at 425° F for about 15 minutes and oh baby

This came out so much better than I could have ever expected I am not lying usually these final dishes you make which is random ingredients in your house are like you know six seven out of 10 which is fine the goal is to use up the ingredients but this is a whole new

Creation that is unbelievable so that is it I used every single ingredient except this third of cabbage I have left I’m just going to feed it to the chickens give them a little treat and now’s your chance to let me know how I did Below in

The comments 1 to 10 be as honest as possible and maybe this has inspired you to try your own $50 challenge I love doing cooking challenges the first one I ever did on this channel was many years ago it was a clear my fridge out challenge and it completely reframed my

Mindset in the kitchen to the point where I started getting excited for when ingredients dwindled down and I had to get creative because that’s where some of the best dishes come out of