WEEK 2 – FEED YOUR FAMILY for UNDER $400 A MONTH! FULL RECIPES & MEAL PLAN INCLUDED!

Welcome back for WEEK 2 of the month long meal plan series!!! I am really enjoying all these meals and the average cost of the meals is really low! YAY!
Today I am going to break down the cost of each dinner (as well as several lunches) so that you can see the affordablitliy of these meals!

You can find the first two weeks of meals along with the recipes at the bottom of this page (if they don’t fit, check the comments, I’ll put the rest there!).
Make sure to stay tuned, and come back next week for even more meals and money saving tips!

Here are some of the items I used in the video today, in case you want to check them out….
Cuisinart Griddler – https://amzn.to/4ftiC6J
Crock Pot – https://amzn.to/3HpmRDS
Wooden Cutting Board – https://amzn.to/4mxduB1
Zojuirishi Bread Maker – https://amzn.to/3HnOmOa
Iron Skillet – https://amzn.to/4m7kKnj

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Week 1 MEAL PLAN (recipes to come in next week’s video)
Sunday:
Breakfast: Oatmeal
Lunch: Sandwiches & Chips
Dinner: BLTs, carrots with ranch
For each BLT sandwich, fry two pieces of bacon. Drain. Add Mayo, lettuce, sliced tomatoes and cheese (optional) to the bacon between two pieces of bread….I really know you already know this, but….I promised recipes, so I am delivering recipes 😉

Monday:
Breakfast: Oatmeal
Lunch: Taco Soup
In crock pot, add two large cans crushed tomatoes, 1 pkg corn (I used frozen, but canned is good too), 2 C black beans, 1 C cooked chicken (I used rotisserie chicken, and this is optional), 1 TBS dill, 1 TBS cumin, 1 TBS chili powder, 2 tsp salt, 1 C water. Stir all ingredients and cook on high for 4 hours, low for 6.
Dinner: Sausage, Egg & Cheese Biscuits
To make sausage, grind in meat grinder (here’s a hand crank one for under $30 – https://amzn.to/3H3um3r) and mix in 2 tsp salt, 2 tsp Italian seasoning, 1 tsp sugar or maple syrup. Form into patties and cook in skillet.
For biscuits: Combine 2 C flour, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp salt and stir well. Blend in 1/4 C bacon grease (or butter) until mixture is crumbly. Add 1 C buttermilk (regular milk will work as well). Stir well and form into biscuits, or drop them onto baking sheet for easy drop biscuits. Bake at 425F 12-15 minutes, until golden brown. Cut in half after cooling slightly and add 1 slice cheese, 1 scrambled egg, and 1 piece of sausage.

Tuesday:
Breakfast: Egg Biscuits (see above….make enough if you want leftovers (; )
Lunch: Taco Soup (ditto)
Dinner: Rice & Bean Bowls
For each serving, prepare 1/4 C rice and 1/4 C black beans according to packing directions. Sauté chicken with oil, salt, chili powder, cumin and garlic powder until well done. Chop tomatoes, lettuce. Shred cheese. Add all ingredients to a bowl and top with cilantro lime dressing, optional.

Please look in pinned comment for rest of meal plan and recipes.

Thanks for watching today!
I love you,
Lori
#budgetmeals #lowbudgetmeals #easyrecipes #recipe #crockpotcooking #mealideas #mealplan #healthyandcheap #healthymeals #viralrecipe #dinnerideas #dinner #budgetfriendlyeats #$10meals #cheapmeals #frugalmeals #lowcostmeals #budgetmealplan #feedyourfamily #1dollarchallenge #extremegrocerybudget #challenge

0:00 – Intro
0:42 – Breakfast Budget
4:23 – Organic vs Conventional
5:34 – Budget Recap
9:39 – Meal Cost Breakdowns
23:13 – Next Week’s Plan
24:57 – Outro

Okay, are you ready for week two of the month-long meal plan? I am ready. I have lots of things to talk to you about today. Got some questions to answer, some recipes to share, lots of tips and hints about how to feed your family on less every single month. You can find the meal list for this week and the recipes down in the description box below so that you can create your grocery list for this week as well. I have $300 left over in my budget for the month. I’m still perfectly on schedule. So, I’m going to run into Aldi. Come along with me and I’ll show you what I’m going to buy this week. [Music] Well, first of all, thank you for coming back for part two of our month-long frugal meal plan. I’m really excited about all of the stuff we have to talk about. And at the start, if you haven’t seen part one, we went over how to create a frugal budget for a month-long meal plan in last week’s video. I’ll link it here in the corner. Also, I’ll put a link down in the description box so it’ll be easy for you to find. I wanted to talk about a couple of things that kept coming up in the comment section of last week’s video. There have been two main topics that have been readressed over and over again. So, that tells me that I didn’t do a good job of explaining myself or expressing what I intended in the first video. So, first of all, let’s talk about the breakfast budget section of the video last week. Several of you mentioned how it seemed pretty impossible to have a $2 breakfast food budget per person. And I have to say I agree that it is really pushing it, especially if you have a small family to be able to feed everybody on $2 per person for breakfast. But what I want us to do is sort of broaden the topic and not look at it as a week, but as a month. It’s a lot easier, especially if you are working with a smaller family, say two or three people, instead of a family size like mine, five or more. It’s a lot easier for you to think about planning your budget on a monthlong basis. So, if I say $2 per week per person, it sounds a lot easier to do if we talk about $8 or $10 per month per person for breakfast. It’s still really small. It’s still really compact. And I’m expecting a lot out of that $10. But when you think about it on a month-long basis, it’s a lot easier for you to break down the per meal cost and to be able to see that you really can use up that food before it goes bad. So, let’s talk about a couple of specific examples that I used for this meal plan, and then you can sort of ask the questions that you need to ask down in the comments below. But let’s think about some specific meals that we can plan for breakfast. That would be within that $2 or $3 per person per week cost point. If we think about oatmeal, a container of oatmeal at Aldi is $3.99 in my area. We have 30 servings in that $3.99 container. We probably don’t want to just eat oatmeal. I like to have brown sugar and some nuts or raisins in mine. So, if we add some amount for our oatmeal, let’s just say we’ll add $2 for the month worth of brown sugar and another $4 or so for raisins or nuts. So, now we’re up to about $10 or $11. And that will get you 30 servings for $10 or $11. So, there we are right in our range of $2 to $3 per week per person. Even if you’re feeding just one person, we can think on a bulk scale. And this one purchase of oatmeal, brown sugar, and nuts or raisins, it’s going to last us the entire month. And obviously, I want you to work out your budget however it works best for you and your family. But I’m just giving you some suggestions about how to really pair down the cost of the meals, especially breakfast and lunch so that we’ll have a little bit of extra money to spend on our dinners. Another meal that we could think about having for the month would be something like pancakes. So, let’s talk about recipes for making pancakes for the month. So, if you wanted to have pancakes every day for the entire month, let’s say two to three pancakes per day, and we would end up having 30 servings of pancakes, which would be about 60 to 90 pancakes. And you can put them in the freezer, however you want to do it. This is just an example. The cost of making those pancakes would be about $5. And then if you want to add syrup, which who would want to go without syrup, that would probably be another $2 or $3. So, we’re at about $7 to $8 for the entire month for one person to eat breakfast. I’m just trying to give you some ideas about how we can really go in super tight on the breakfast. Absolutely budget for as much breakfast as you want to have. But these are just some examples. And the other thing that came up several times in the comments of last week’s video is how I was buying organic produce and how that was not a good financial choice. So, this is a decision that each one of our families has to make for ourselves. It is not a right or wrong in my opinion. This is just sort of how you choose to land on this particular topic. There’s no shaming here. I’m not going to be happy or upset if you buy all organic or all conventional. It does not matter to me. But I’m just going to give you my reasoning behind why I do what I do and you can take it for what it’s worth. So, where I land on organic produce is I want to try to support organic farming as much as I possibly can because I feel like in my research and in my studies, organic produce is just healthier overall than conventional. Now, that’s my opinion, but that doesn’t mean that it’s right. That’s just what I believe. And if I can spend a little bit extra and I have that to give, I’m happy to spend a small percentage more for organic food. I cannot justify double or triple the cost just so that I can buy organic ingredients. So, here’s where I’ve landed. If an organic item is 50 cents or less more than the conventional item, I will spend the extra0 50 cents to purchase the organic option. If however, it is substantially more than 50. I just really cannot justify spending that much more. After adding up the additional cost of the organic options that I bought this week, it was about $5 more than if I had bought the conventional produce. So55 or $10 per week is something that I’m willing to justify in order to have some organic ingredients. But again, that is completely personal and it’s a decision that you have to make. It is really helpful for you to do some thinking on this topic before you go to the store. That way, you don’t have a lot of decision fatigue. You’re able to make quick and easy decisions without feeling like you have to justify one way or the other. And one other thing before we move on, I wanted to say thank you to several of you who came to my defense after one commenter was not so kind in the way that she approached this topic. And I wanted to say thank you for having my back. Thank you for being my friend. Thank you for keeping this a positive environment. It means a lot to me that you’re willing to defend me. And just so you know, I just really try to let those kinds of comments roll off my back. Now we can move on to the bulk part of the video. There’s a million different ways that I could go about talking about all the things I want to say today. So, I’m going to try to be as organized in my thoughts as possible. First, we can begin by talking about how much money is left in the budget. I have $228 in cash left in my wallet. And I’m feeling really good about that because I am halfway done in the month and I have a lot more than half of my money. I’m really hoping to come in substantially under $400, and I have high hopes for that. So, this week at Aldi, I spent $78. I spent $49 last time at Aldi, and I had some specialty items that I needed to buy for one of my daughters who has a food allergy at Trader Joe’s. And then some coffee at Costco. Y’all, coffee has gotten so expensive. I noticed at Aldi the coffee has gone to almost $8 in my area. That is a lot. So, I guess the tariffs have hit coffee, but hopefully we can keep the rest of our budget low enough because I certainly cannot eliminate coffee from my budget. I ended up spending $100 cash last week and then the $78 cash this week. So, I have $222 left. I am feeling really good about where I am and I am also doing well working through a lot of my food storage. I have a lot of food in my freezer that I realized just today I have got to get rid of because my daughter is getting married in less than two months. We are catering the reception and I have to have a lot of room for frozen lasagna that we’re going to provide at the meal. So, I’m going to have to continue to work through all of the food in my freezer. So, stay tuned for that. What I can’t go through this month, we’re going to have to keep going through in September. So, just buckle up. We’re going to try to get rid of all of that food storage. Next, let’s move on to lunch. I have made taco soup. That taco soup was about 10 servings. It ended up costing $6.50 for me to make it. I used half of the meat from a rotisserie chicken and that, so that really helped the price point on that to stay pretty low. Also, I had planned to make vegetable soup and my mom actually gave me a pot of vegetable soup that she had made. So, I didn’t create that here at my house. It actually was free. But, I did add up the cost of what it would have cost me to make it and it would have been about $4.75 for 10 servings. So, that’s also really affordable. We have not been eating as much as I expected. So, I’ve had a lot of leftovers for lunches. That has been really nice. And that is the joy of meal planning. If you can have just a few extra servings at dinner and that bring you over through to lunches and have everybody’s lunch prepared ahead of time, that makes things go so smooth during the day and it keeps all of your food stock rotating and nothing having to be thrown out. So, the lunch section of the meal plan is going really good. I ran out of time and didn’t leave any of the recipes down in the description box for last week’s video, but you can find week one and week 2 recipes down in the description box or in the first pinned comment. Sometimes they won’t fit in the description box, so you can always just scroll down and find them there. I thought it would be helpful for me to just sort of give you a rundown of the specific cost for each of the meals that I had planned for dinners. As you can probably tell, I’m a little sick, so I haven’t quite made everything up to the day 14 quite yet. But I am working my way through it, and I have made most of the meals in the dinner section of the meal plan. Let’s start with the maple pork roast. That ended up costing about $4.75. I allowed 2 lbs of pork for that cost. The pork ended up costing less than $1.50 per pound, which was a great deal. And I added some maple syrup to that and had green beans on the side. We also had some bread. So I’ve allowed about 10 cents per slice of bread. So for my family of five, that meal cost about $5. I also used that pork roast to make barbecue pork nachos. That was a really simple, easy way to recreate that pork loin. And all I had to do was add barbecue sauce and chop up the nacho ingredients. That was a super simple and easy meal, and it ended up costing about $7.50 for my family of five. I also had planned to make sausage, egg, and cheese biscuits with that pork loin. I haven’t really gotten around to making my sausage with the pork. I’ve talked before about how you can use your meat grinder attachment on your KitchenAid. You can put in your raw pork loin, grind it through, and then add your own seasonings and make some really healthy, inexpensive sausage. Again, I haven’t gotten around to making that meal in particular yet, but the cost of it will be $6.40 for five servings. Next up, we had rice and bean bowls. This is one of my family’s favorite meals, and this is actually the cheapest dinner that we have had so far on the meal plan. For five servings, it ended up costing $3.75. And that’s including adding chicken. Some of the most affordable ways to add chicken to that meal is either having a rotisserie chicken from Costco or Sam’s, or I also found boneless, skinless chicken thighs that were marked half off, which made it $1.50 per pound. So either way, that’s going to be a really affordable way to add chicken and extra protein to the rice bowls. And again, that is a really super affordable and enjoyable dinner. I had a spiral sliced ham that I had purchased from Aldi in the spring of this year and had put it in the freezer waiting for that best opportunity to use it. I’ve pulled it out for this month’s meal plan. That ham ended up costing 49 cents a pound. There were about 4 lbs of usable ham. So, that was a really, really affordable option for my meals. I did plan to use it one night for a ham and cheese kiche that again I haven’t gotten around to making yet, but the cost of the ingredients for that meal was $460 for five servings. And speaking of the kiche brings up another point I wanted to make with you today and that is I’m trying to have sort of theme days or theme nights for this meal plan. I feel like the more that we can garner some kind of family excitement and involvement in our meal plans, the more successful it will be and the more our family will look forward to meal time instead of feeling like they’re having to eat leftovers all the time or the same things over and over again. So on Monday nights, I’m trying to have a breakfast themed dinner. I really feel like breakfasts are one of the easiest and least expensive meal options. And when we can bring breakfast into dinner time, it brings a lot of excitement, at least for my family. My family loves having breakfast for dinner. And it also gives us an opportunity to use the less expensive ingredient items at dinner time. So, in addition to that ham and cheese kiche, I also had scheduled French toast. You can make French toast in the crock pot. This is another recipe that I’ve not gotten around to making, but the cost of the ingredients is $5.30 for my whole family. That is a really inexpensive, nourishing, filling dinner. And speaking of the ingredients, I wanted to touch on how I’m handling the cost of the eggs. I know that during the spring of this year, eggs had been really, really expensive. In my area, they’re going down. They’re still a little pricey, but have gone down a good bit. And my local Aldi has eggs for $2.70 for a dozen. So, that is the cost that I’m inputting whenever I calculate how much these meals are going to cost. Of course, I have a ton of eggs on my counter, as you can see, and they don’t cost me anything except a little bit of chicken feed every day, so I’m able to use eggs to my advantage, and I have done that during this meal plan. I have hardboiled a lot of eggs, and we have had eggs for breakfast several times. Anytime that you have an abundance of an ingredient, try to find ways to use them in interesting and unique ways so that your family won’t get tired of having the same things over and over again, but you will also be able to reap the benefits of the overabundance and inexpensive ingredients. Speaking of the theme nights, on Tuesday nights, I tried to have like a Mexican theme night because, you know, taco Tuesdays. The first Tuesday was the rice and bean bowls. I’ve already talked about them. But for the second Tuesday night, I scheduled fajitas. And that is a really easy dinner that doesn’t cost a lot of money if you can find the meat on a discount. So the meat again that I found this week was boneless skinless chicken thighs. It ended up being 1.50 a pound. You can make this meal a little more hearty if you can find meat that is on sale. So, I may have used a pound and a half instead of a pound. Also, our bell peppers were three for $2. That’s a pretty good price. And the onions are really inexpensive as well. I paired it with some rice. And I cooked the rice in the microwave. It was really easy. So, this meal didn’t take long to put together, and the total cost was $5.85 for five servings. Really affordable, really good. This next meal really surprised me on the cost, but there’s an understandable reason why. The spaghetti was one of the most expensive meals on our meal plan this week, and it is because I chose to use ground beef instead of a lesser expensive ground meat. The reason I did that was because I struggle with anemia. I have low iron a lot of the time and I’m trying to incorporate a little bit more beef products into our meal plan because I really feel like I need that, my girls need that. So, I was willing to pay the $5.50 for the pound of hamburger meat. But if you don’t have the anemia issue, you can totally cut this in half by getting ground turkey or ground chicken or grinding it yourself would even be better. So, the spaghetti and green beans ended up costing me $8.70. My pasta was the Valentine pasta that I had gotten forever ago for 20 cents a bag. So, that did help, but it didn’t help a lot. That meat really upped the price of this meal, but it was really good. And it’s really simple to make your own homemade spaghetti sauce. It’s really nice to be able to control the ingredients. I didn’t even look at the spaghetti sauce. I just grabbed a can of tomatoes and added stuff to it at home, but you probably for about the same price can get a can of spaghetti sauce and save yourself the time. Our next dinner in the meal plan was kraut and sausage. Again, I got beef sausage. There really isn’t much difference in the price at Aldi, but this is a really easy meal to put together. It’s one of my favorites. This is also a really good lunch meal. I just sauteed the sausage, added half of the container of kraut, and I served it with some green beans. I add a little bit of oil to the green beans whenever I cook them. You can also add bacon grease, which is a really good addition, and it’s free if you’ve already had bacon. So, the final cost of this meal was $5 for five servings. Really affordable, really yummy. It’s It’s one of those comfort foods that are one of my favorites. Speaking of bacon, I had a BLT sandwich on the menu plan. That was a really simple meal and it was really good. I love to have BLTs in the summer with homegrown tomatoes. My dad had given me some tomatoes, so that was perfect. I fried up the bacon and I had the bacon grease to set aside for cooking my eggs and adding to the green beans. Whenever you’re making a month-long meal plan, it’s a lot easier to combine all of the pieces and parts of all of the different ingredients that you buy so that you’re much less likely to waste any of the food. The best way for us to make the most of the items that we buy with our grocery money is to use every single piece and part of it. So, that may sound like a little thing, but it’s really not little when you think about all of the butter and oil that you can replace with the free baking grease that you can cook with. I made some homemade bread. It didn’t really turn out the way I wanted it to, but it was good enough. And the total cost of the BLT sandwiches and carrots was $7.50. Several of you commented about the baked potatoes in the crock pot last week. That is a really great timesaver and it works every single time. Just rinse your potatoes, poke a hole in them, add them to your crock pot, however many you need, and add about a cup of water or so. The baked potato bar ended up costing $5. That was another way for us to use the spiral sliced ham that we had. Another way that we used the spiral sliced ham was with a chef salad. I just chopped up all of the ingredients. Again, my hard-boiled eggs came in handy on this meal. And some cheese. This cheese is so weird right now at Aldi. I don’t like to buy pre-shredded cheese because they include ingredients in it that keeps it from melting well. But the slices don’t have that ingredient. And believe it or not, the slices of cheese are cheaper than the block of cheese. I have not figured that out. You get half a pound of Havari for $1.69 and then eight ounces of the block of cheese is $1.90. I don’t understand this. I don’t know why they’re doing this, but I’m fine with it because I can just quickly and easily chop it into smaller pieces. So, that worked out well for the chef salad. I had lots of different ingredients to add several of them from my back porch garden, which is always nice. The total cost of five servings of the chef salad was $7.65. The last meal was a chabatada roll with some of the spiral sliced ham and some basil pesto with cheese. This was a really quick, fancied up ham and cheese sandwich. I got the chabatada rolls half off and I’ve already mentioned that the ham was super cheap. So, that meal cost about $4 for the five servings. And we can add that one to the quick and easy list as well. So, if I add all of those costs up and divide that by 14, that’s the number of dinners in the meal plan so far, we come up with an average cost of $6 per dinner. That is really good. Two weeks worth of meals that have averaged out to be $6 each night. I think that that is incredible. And not only is it remarkable that it’s that inexpensive, but there is nothing boring about this meal plan. So, I feel like I’ve really got my feet underneath me for the last half of the meal plan. I feel like we’re in a really good place financially that we have over half of our budget left over. And I feel like we have a really good plan going forward. So, we have two weeks to go. Next week, we’re going to talk a little bit more in depth about some of the specific things that I think are really great ways to save as much money as possible whenever you’re going through your month-long meal plan, things that you can do at the grocery store, things that you can do at home, some tips and hints that might help us to save as much money as we can as we go throughout the month, and things that we can sort of put in our mind as practical tips to keep us on track and to keep us from overspending each month. If we can keep our grocery budget right around $4 to $500 for a family of five each and every month, think about how much money that will save. If you are one of those frugal grocery shoppers that can feed your family for less than $100 each week, I would love to hear all of your tips down in the comments below. Please let us know all of your hints and strategies. Also, before we end today’s video, if you have found this video helpful, I really hope that you would give it a like. Also, I would really appreciate it if you could think of a couple of people to share it with. Sharing the video really helps the channel to grow and to be sent out to a wider audience so that we can help more and more people feed their family healthy and nourishing food for less. If you are new here and you haven’t subscribed to the channel, I would love to have you as a part of the homemade simple community, I hope today’s video was helpful for you. I have sure enjoyed sharing all of these meal ideas with you so far, and I can’t wait for next week’s video. But until then, I hope you have a wonderful week. I love you, and I will see you again next time. [Music]