Food

The first one is if you go to Trader Joe's, they have a $1 pizza dough and it's enough for either, it depends how much you eat, it could be one person or two people, you could split it or have leftovers or whatever. You just get that pizza dough for a dollar, you get like the tomato sauce for like two or three dollars and then just mozzarella cheese for another three dollars or something like that and then whatever other toppings you want. So it ends up being like under ten dollars and it's a pretty good sized meal and you probably won't use all the sauce all at once or all the cheese so you'll end up having leftovers which is super nice.

One quick and easy and cheap meal that we have a lot in my household are Hawaiian haystacks. Just cook some chicken, cook some rice, get some curry with chicken soup, put it in the pan with the chicken. If you want to get fancy, you can add a little bit of milk, some mayonnaise, and some curry powder. And yeah, put the sauce on the rice. If you want, you can add pineapple. Yeah, it's pretty good, and whatever toppings you want.

One of my family's favorite easy and fairly cheap meals is chicken enchilada soup. And basically it's just a can of your favorite enchilada sauce, a can of cream of chicken soup, some chicken broth, leftover chicken or you can cook fresh chicken or you can use canned chicken, and a can of green chilies. And you throw all of that together and you sprinkle on some shredded cheese or some sour cream or crumble up some tortilla chips. Really tasty dinner and quick and easy and cheap. And you can actually do it from food storage items as well.

The best budget friendly meal that I can think of is like my wife and I, we always just buy like a meat and then like a complimentary, something to go on the side and we don't like season it or anything, but we just cook one big, like, so like we'll throw like an entire bag of like chicken in the Insta pot and then make like a lot of rice and throughout the week, depending on what we want the meal to taste like, we season it when we eat it. So if you add like vegetables to it and do like teriyaki sauce, it's like chicken and rice stir fry. Or if you want to do like chicken and rice over like gravy or something, you just like make gravy. So like that's super budget friendly and it's very cost and like time effective as well.

Breakfast or dinner is always a plus. We do breakfast burritos, tortillas and eggs, and sausage and bacon inside sometimes as well. We've done waffles, which you literally can make out of flour, sugar, and water, with like fruit on top, and they're super good with like a side of eggs. And we've also done french toast, which you can get like the nicer like fluffy bread, and you can put it, you just like put it in the egg mix, the cinnamon, sugar, and you can like douse it in whipped cream and fruit for like treating ourselves. That's, that's the way. We like to do loaded potatoes as well, super easy one, because potatoes are really cheap. But you literally just like poke holes in the potatoes, wash them off, put them in the oven. You have to cook them for like an hour. It's only downside, they take forever to cook. But then you just like bust them open, and you got, just get your same sour cream and chai. You do have, it's good with chives and like a little bit of bacon, so extra things that you have to buy, but they're really cheap still. Or just like good to have on hand. Yeah, and it's like super easy and super delicious and filling.

Grilled cheese and tomato soup, always a great cheap option. You can spice it up though by getting like sourdough bread if you like that. And like dousing each side of butter and like parsley and garlic salt just like hyping it up. And then the tomato soup you can like you literally just buy in those boxes, it's super cheap. But you can heat up on the stove and put like oregano in it, it tastes a lot better usually. And you can dip and eat, it's super good. We also like to do like homemade zao bowls. So we'll just like get rice and marinate chicken and like some Italian dressing. And then there's like this spicy mayonnaise sauce that we love and we like peel up carrots with a peeler and we cut up cucumbers and we kind of just put it on this bowl with peanuts and then we like put the marinara sauce on the top and it is super yummy, super easy too. Another super easy one is hard shell tacos. You can buy a hard shell taco, you cook up some ground beef, you put like a taco seasoning packet in there, and then you put the ground beef and the cheese in the taco, put in the oven, let it melt, cover it in tomato, lettuce, and sour cream. It's super delicious and cheap.

If you're looking for like an easy lunch that you can kind of prep beforehand and then take it on the go, we do like pasta salads and they're like super cheap and easy. You just have to boil some of those spiral noodles that are like orange, yellow, and green colored and you cut up some cherry tomatoes, some cucumber, you can add like a chicken tenderloin, you can cut one up, throw it in there. We also like to do olives because we like olives and then you kind of just like meal prep that on a Tupperware, throw it in the fridge and then in the morning when you have to go to school or work, you can pick it up and then we just like bring, so ghetto, but like a baggie of ranch. I just like squirt it on there so it doesn't get soggy but it is super yummy. We call it pasta salad. Another super easy and cheap meal preppable option for lunch is overnight oats. We specifically do like a chunky monkey version. It's what they call it in the recipe but you just get a little Tupperware and you put in a cup of oats, you put in a cup of almond milk and then you like douse it with a little bit of chocolate chips, a little bit of coconut flakes, shredded coconut flakes, and then like a spoonful of peanut butter and then you swirl it all around, put it in the fridge and it will sit overnight and then in the morning when you wake up, have to go to school or work, you can just like chop up some fruit. I like strawberries the best on top and then you're good to eat it later and we make four, five, six at a time. Just let them sit in the fridge and they last forever. So super good, super cheap, super easy.

I mentioned before in one of the million videos I've made in this section that french bread is super cheap. So we like to make french bread pizzas and I think that they're so good. You just like cut the french bread in half and then you cut the halves into like thirds and you put down like your sauce, your mozzarella, your pepperoni, you can put sausage if you want but usually we don't. Um you just cook it in the oven and then it like cooks all nice and it's super crunchy and super delicious and also makes tons of leftovers because that french bread's like long and huge so it's great.

We've done pesto wraps before, which is where you just get a tortilla and one like tenderloin of chicken and then you douse it in like pesto sauce that you can just buy at the store, it's already pre-made, and then cheese. You wrap them up and you put it in the oven, let them bake until they're crispy and then you eat it and it's super good. Another one that we love, we call them Mexican haystacks or frito boats if you're familiar with this, but it's literally this like can of beans mixed with meat. It can't be more than like two dollars or three. And you heat it up on the stove and then you serve it over fritos, but we get the off-brand kind because honestly they taste better and they're cheaper. Serve it over fritos and then same thing, sour cream, lettuce and tomatoes. So as you can see, we just eat the same thing all kinds of ways.

I'm a newly married college student who loves to save money, so any video that I post in this section is definitely good budget-friendly food. One of the first ones I thought of is homemade lasagna. We make this all the time. You literally just need cottage cheese, an egg, you need parsley, some ground beef, your favorite marinara sauce, and then lasagna noodles. And then you just put in layers and cook it all up and you can just get like a loaf of french bread that's like three bucks, if I remember right. Super cheap. And you got yourself a delicious dinner. Another one we like to make in the crock pot, we call it creamy chicken. So again, you get four tenderloins of chicken. This serves about two people, by the way, because I'm cooking for myself. You get four tenderloins of chicken, you get half a cube of cream cheese, you get half a cube of butter, half a block of cream cheese, sorry, half a cube of butter, and then you get this like zest, it's called like zesty Italian seasoning. You can just like get it at Walmart and you dump the bag in. I'm pretty sure that's it. You let it cook all day again. At the end of the day, shred the chicken, stir it all up, it's all creamy, and you serve it over rice. It's super good. Another great one is one we make called, it's called enchilada soup. You just get a crock pot and you get like four tenderloins of chicken. You do a can of black beans, a can of Mexican stewed tomatoes, like half a cup of salsa. I think that's literally it. You literally, and then you just like cook it on low all day long. You come back, shred the chicken up, stir it around, serve it with chips and sour cream and cheese. Super good.

This option is slightly pricier, um, but it's still very reasonable for like a college student. And again, if I would buy it, it means it's decently cheap. Um, but you can buy just like tenderloin, um, just like from Walmart. They're like $8 and they feed two people for sure with leftovers. Like we always have leftovers and they're so easy to cook. You just, um, you have to cut it up obviously and then we just season it with like Montreal steak seasoning and put it in the oven, cook it so good. And then you can just get some frozen green beans in a bag and thaw them out, fry them in some oil, salt and pepper them. And then we put lemon on them with cheese, like Parmesan cheese on the top. And it like makes them all crispy and it is a perfect side for the tenderloin. So awesome meal if you want to kind of heighten it up, heighten the stakes a little.

This meal is very budget-friendly for two, possibly three people. I like to go to Trader Joe's and get one pack of orange chicken and just make rice at home and one thing of orange chicken will feed definitely three people and so you can have leftovers in the fridge and they heat up super easily and get frozen broccoli from Walmart, I believe, and that will feed you for like three or four meals so super cheap and it tastes so good.

Something we really like to do is do bowls, any type of bowl with a base of rice and chicken, and you can add whatever toppings. We just do canned beans, canned corn, one avocado, and like some tomatoes with some sauce. And you can kind of just differentiate between the bowls and like add different things to each one. So we really like doing bowl options. And that being said, just anything with chicken. I know getting a huge thing of frozen chicken at Costco is really expensive, but if you break it down and you just use one chicken breast per meal, it lasts such a long time. So anything with chicken and rice, probably.

I run out of time every single day to make dinner. So something that I've been trying to do is do more crock pot meals. So you just take a couple frozen chicken breasts, pour whatever sauce, salsa you like, put it on for six hours, and then at the end of six hours you just like peel it apart and you can put it in a taco or on top of rice. And that is literally the best chicken you'll have. And it's so tender and it's so juicy and it is so easy to make because you leave it alone for six hours.

Chicken breast and rice, that's a real cheap way to be full and eat a lot. Other cheap and budget-friendly meals you can do like ground beef and pasta, anything like that you can buy in bulk and then cheap grains.