Maddie here! A few weeks ago Emily and I decided to do a $30 grocery budget challenge after being inspired by this video from Green Saves you Green. We decided that the rules of our challenge would be: try to spend $30 for one week, you can use what you have in your pantry, non-food and baby food items do not count. When I first told my husband about this idea I said “won’t this be fun?!” and he said “I don’t know what your idea of fun is…” Well, it turns out this is my idea of fun!
We had a lot of great things come out of this challenge. We have now stopped buying both sparkling water and ice cream on a weekly basis. We found that we are fine with just water and milk throughout the week (my husband enjoys the .59 coke from Lidl) and we have been having herbal tea after dinner instead of the extra sugar. I also lost 2 pounds on this challenge! While you can see below that these meals are not the healthiest, I think it really helped to be more intentional with my portion sizes, knowing that I needed to stretch everything for the whole week. Another benefit of the week was gaining confidence in my ability to make recipes on the fly. In making the meals stretch, I got creative and tried a few things that I normally would not have. We have never spent so little for a week and it feels great knowing that we could do it again.
Here’s what we did!
Produce
Yellow Squash….$.58
Green Peppers (x3)…$.99
Bananas (2 lbs)…$.91
Apple Bag…$2.99
Meat
Whole Chicken (6.3 lbs)…$5.99
Pork Sausage…$1.89
Dairy
1% Milk (Gallon)…$3.61
Whipping Cream…$1.79
Eggs (18)…$1.48
Pantry
White Bread…$.59
Wheat Bread…$.95
Corn Tortillas…$1.29
Peanut Butter…$1.15
Black Beans…$.47
Tortilla Chips…$.92
Fettuccini…$.82
Cola…$.59
Frozen
Frozen Mixed Veggies…$1.00
Frozen Pizza…$2.75
Night One: I cooked the whole chicken in the instant pot and made mashed potatoes and gravy with a side of vegetables. We had the potatoes and the veggies in our pantry stock. I shredded the remaining chicken for use throughout the week- I had intentionally picked a bigger chicken than I usually would have because I knew we were going to need meat throughout the week. I saved the chicken carcass and made chicken broth overnight. I didn’t have any vegetable scraps to include this time so the broth was lighter than usual but it still tasted great.
Our dinner.
The remaining chicken meat.
Homemade chicken broth.
Night Two: This was definitely our favorite meal of the week! We had some leftover kale that I wanted to incorporate into a pasta dish. We chose fettuccini at the store because all pastas were the same price. I first sauteed the kale with some garlic and red pepper flakes and set aside. I created a cream sauce using 1 cup of the homemade chicken broth, 1 cup of the heavy whip, an onion we had on hand, and 2 tablespoons of flour. I combined the shredded chicken, kale, and fettuccini with the cream sauce and paired it with sauteed green beans that we had in our freezer.
Night Three: I made potato soup with the potatoes and onions from our pantry, our homemade broth, and heavy cream. I browned half of the breakfast sausage for added protein. I also sprinkled in a dried vegetable soup mix that we keep in our pantry for added nutrition (my hubby was not a fan of this final move).
Night Four: I made chicken fried rice using the frozen veggie mix, the yellow squash, 2 green peppers, shredded chicken, and rice that we had on hand. I sprinkled it with soy sauce and some garlic chili sauce that we keep in the fridge.
Night Five: These chicken tacos were yum! I used the remaining kale that we had on hand and sautéed it with black beans, onion, and shredded chicken. I added some cumin and chili powder to bring out the Mexican flavor and put some queso that I keep in the fridge on my tacos. We also had some leftover salsa from a few weeks ago that we topped our tacos with!
Night Six: We had some burgers and fries from our freezer! We put them on the white bread which was fine.
Night Seven: We made it! For this night we just had our frozen pizza and topped it with the remaining green bell pepper.
Breakfasts: For breakfast, I created breakfast sausage patties and we ate them with eggs! We also had peanut butter toast with banana.
Lunch: We actually ended up eating a lot of leftovers for lunch! We had extras of the pasta, fried rice, and potato soup. We could have stretched our dinner meals out for additional nights and had PB&Js with tortilla chips for the whole week and saved even more money…WOAH.
Snacks: We had apples and I also had graham crackers in the pantry that I enjoyed with PB throughout the week. It really helped us to buy two loaves of bread because we knew that we would always have an option for a snack if needed.
I really enjoyed documenting this $30 grocery budget challenge and it turns out we needed the extra money that we saved at the end of the month! I would encourage anyone to do this kind of challenge. It made me think outside of my usual meal planning box about how to accomplish the $30 budget and it also made me appreciate the food that much more.
Sister Hack 