(electric guitar playing)
Hey guys! Welcome to Make It Dairy Free. I am Larisha, and today we are showing you five
dinners for under $50 when shopping at Aldi. So we want this video to show you what a realistic vegan
budget and vegan meals look like when shopping for a family of four. These are meals that we actually
eat in our family as well as products that we actually purchase from Aldi. I'm gonna start this
video by showing the grocery haul and then also the receipt and then we will get into the meals.
But stay tuned into the end because I will go over some tips, show you what we have left over,
and some more. So let's get right into the video and show you what we got.
So I just wanted to do
like a quick overview haul of everything that we got. So starting with our produce, you can see we
just have some potatoes, limes, garlic, broccoli, peppers, and onions. And we're definitely gonna
have leftovers here because we don't need all the potatoes or the limes or the onions or the peppers.
But that's great because we can either just make more of this next week or these are all like
pantry essential things so no worries there. Moving on to the dry stuff we just have a few things here
and obviously we are also going to have leftover flour which is always great to have in your pantry.
But all of these things at Aldi are great prices which makes sticking to a budget super easy .
Um just a quick tip about the basmati rice, this is just the one that we prefer
however there are definitely cheaper options at Aldi so if you needed your budget to come down
even more you could definitely switch that out. All right and then we have like this uh
pasta sauce and this salsa here that I definitely would say aren't our favorites, um but they work
for a budget and they work for the meals that we're going to be using them for in this video.
And then we just have our refrigerated stuff. So we have some oat milk, vegan mozzarella, and some tofu
Aldi just started carrying the tofu and the oat milk within the past few months. And then they
reformulated this mozzarella and it's actually pretty good now, so if you haven't seen our vegan
shredded uh cheese taste test make sure that you check that out and you can see us trying it.
And then I just have some hummus here for a recipe that we are going to be using. All right so i know
you guys want to see the receipt so you can see everything that we bought and then you can see
that we spent $40.93 so we will talk about that at the end of the video. Let's get into the meals.
(alternative hip hop playing)
All right so broccoli and hummus pasta. This one is definitely the easiest out of the five
meals that we will be making. It is literally just three ingredients, Now, I did hack this one
a little bit in order to get it to be just three ingredients. Um on the website post for this recipe
it tells you the instructions on how to make your own hummus. However um Aldi doesn't carry tahini so
uh we just bought hummus. Obviously if you go buy tahini somewhere else, you could get this one down
a little bit more in your budget, as far as like price per serving, because you know chickpeas
and you know the other ingredients that you would need for this one would be cheaper than buying the
hummus that we bought. As far as allergens for this one there is a wheat in the form of the pasta but
you can just sub that out with a gluten-free pasta and then this one would be top 8 allergen friendly
(alternative hip hop playing)
So vegan taco casserole. This is one of our favorite dishes in our family because it is
so easy to make. You can definitely serve this with like some avocado on the side,
um some fresh cilantro, whatever you have on hand that kind of goes with this. Sometimes we
will also you know grab a bag of tortilla chips or
maybe some flour tortillas something like that. But it's perfectly fine all in its own.
In the grocery haul part of the video, I did mention that this is not our favorite salsa
that we use here, but for this particular recipe we haven't noticed a difference in using like the
fresher salsas versus just the canned one. Um so we always go with that one just because it brings the
budget down some. The recipe on the site for this one does call for vegan cheddar but Aldi only
carries vegan mozzarella, so we just went with it for this video and it actually turned out really
great and we liked it. As far as allergens for this one it is top 8 allergen free as written.
Especially because the Aldi vegan cheese doesn't contain any top 8 allergens. It did have
pea protein and sunflower in it so if those are concerns for you just be mindful of that.
(alternative hip hop playing)
so coconut crusted tofu and potato wedges is our next meal. And I can tell you that I for one ,
hopefully you guys are too that shop at Aldi, was so excited when I found out that Aldi was
going to be carrying tofu permanently in all of its stores. It is the cheapest that I have seen
it anywhere and it is just so good. This one is probably the recipe that is the longest hands-on
out of all the recipes that we are showing you in this video and that's because you have to dip
each piece of tofu. But it's worth it trust me as far as how we cooked this one, the tofu went into
our airfryer and then the potato wedges could be done in an air fryer or inside of the oven we did
both since we wanted it done at the same time. We find that basically one potato per person in our
family works out really well so if you're looking for like a rule of thumb with how many potatoes
you might want to use you can definitely use that. As far as what else you could do if maybe
you don't want to serve potatoes with this uh is that you could make this into like a rice bowl.
So you could have the tofu with maybe another type of vegetable or something and go with that. As
far as allergens in this recipe it does have tofu, coconut and wheat. Which is the most out of any of
the recipes that we are showing in this video. We do have a recipe on the website for spicy coconut
chickpeas. So you would eliminate the tofu and the wheat if you go with that option so check that out.
(alternative hip hop playing)
Can you really go wrong with pizza you guys? I mean who doesn't love pizza. Um we put some
spices into the dough for this one just to give it more flavor, but really it's a few minutes of
prep time, a lot of rising time, and then a few minutes of cook time and you have a delicious
vegan pizza. You could leave this as a vegan cheese pizza, but since we had the peppers and onions and
garlic from the other recipes this week we decided just to throw that on there. And it just it turned
out really good even the kids loved it. As far as allergens for the pizza it does have wheat.
We know that Aldi can- contains, Aldi sells uh almond flour but we have never tried to make that
swap and as far as we know at least all the stores around here they do not sell a gluten-free flour.
(alternative hip hop playing)
All right and lastly we have a soy lime tofu. So obviously this one has soy in it, it's right in the
title. Um you could swap that out with chickpeas and while Aldi doesn't carry tamari maybe you have
it on hand so you could swap that out for the soy sauce if needed, but really this is just a
simple flavorful meal that is good no matter what. It only needs seven ingredients and it is just a
really hands-off recipe that doesn't need a lot of time to make.
All right friends, that is all five
recipes. We really hope that you enjoyed this video. Um if you did and you want to see more of these we
would love to hear about it in the comments. Maybe like a price point option like five meals under
$25 or maybe a different store recommendation. um so leave comments and let us know but ultimately
we just wanted to show you what um a realistic budget and a realistic you know meals looked
like especially for our family. We wanted to go over a few questions. I keep saying we like
Andrew is here, I think it's just out of habit like he's usually beside me but um I wanted to go over
a few questions that you guys might have there will also be a blog post along with this video
so make sure you check that out because i'll go into a little bit more depth about some of the
questions and answers um inside of that. All right so first let's talk about what we have left over.
It is a lot of stuff. Um it's weird seeing it like this. Like i know uh we typically budget uh every
single week but it's weird like seeing exactly what you have left over because all of this stuff
was separated from everything else in the house um all week. um But we have half a box of pasta,
we have uh roughly one to a half one and a half to two cups of rice left, I have four limes, a crap
ton of coconut still, two bags of yeast, i have a clove and a little less than a half of garlic left ,
i have one and then maybe a half of a green pepper, and then we have three and a half onions left .
The flour is still up to here, pretty much the whole bottle of soy sauce ,
a little more than half of the bottle of oat milk , we have a whole bag this one wasn't even open
of the cheese and then there's still maybe a fourth of a cup left in this one.
Pretty much the entire jar of spaghetti sauce, half the jar of salsa, and then
um probably half of, yeah like half of the container of bread crumbs, and then roughly
half of the bag of potatoes. Um so as far as like what you can do with this to reduce your
budget. One if you guys noticed at the beginning in the grocery haul part of it i said that i
spent over uh 93 cents over what I thought i was going to and i know i'm not the only one here
that can relate to this. But produce always gets me. That is uh basically priced per pound and that's
what happened that's why i went over the $40. um I basically forgot that you know the broccoli
is weighed per pound, and so that just pushed me over slightly. But i wasn't sure if i would need
the two bags of mozzarella when using it for the taco casserole and the pizza, um so this is um
$3.49. So if that would have came off then that would have put us well under the forty
dollars um more like thirty seven fifty ish. Don't, again don't ask me to do math .
um But as far as what you can do. One i wanted to mention that if one pizza isn't enough for your
family um you could totally just make like you have plenty you have two more packets of yeast
and um plenty of flour to make um at least two more pizzas inside of here so you could either
make it with the other one that we made or you can use this and make another pizza next week.
there's also a half a bag of pasta still so you could use the spaghetti sauce and the rest of
the pasta maybe bulk it up with the pepper and the onions a little bit and then that would give you
a whole other meal, so that we're up to two meals at this point. Um there are um enough potatoes left
in here that you could do like baked potatoes one night. um So if you did that you could do it with
like the peppers, and the onions, and the garlic, maybe throw a little salsa on there for like a
taco style. um next week you could even grab like another can of beans and corn for like
two dollars and then you could have like you know baked potatoes. Um and then you could totally just
pick up another block of tofu for i think the tofu there is a dollar seventy nine um i believe let me
look just really quickly i don't even see it right this second um where is it oh tofu um yeah dollar
seventy nine um. so you can make the co you have enough limes here you can make the soy lime
tofu with enough rice all over so basically like next week you could spend like ten dollars and
have five more meals so it's great to try to do that with your meals and try to budget even longer.
I used to at some point in time budget for an entire month and that got our budget way down. So i
haven't done that in a really long time but it the basically the longer we planned uh the the more we
could stretch the food out that we were using. As far as what we didn't include in the price of this
um, we assumed that you would have oil already at your house so olive oil and we assumed that you
had spices so we didn't include any of those in the cost of the the total of all of this.
We did we didn't assume you would have things like soy sauce or anything else so that's why those are
included but we pretty much just assumed that you had everything else. One other thing that i wanted
to mention is that we do live in New Jersey so there is no food tax um so you know you may have
to weigh that into your budget uh depending on you know where you live and how much food tax is and
stuff like that. um and i think that that is it so again i hope you like this video if you guys
have any questions um i will be in the comment section and available to chat and hopefully
answer any questions that you may have. So thank you guys so much for watching this uh please
like, comment, subscribe, do all that fun stuff , and we will see you guys in the next video! Bye!