I keep seeing these videos come up in my feeds. How I fed my family 5 dinners under $50. I saw a lady doing a shop and and was like oh look at this lb of ground turkey on sale for $1.99!
$1.99 (*eyeroll*) .
The cheapest lb of ground turkey I can find is $8. And I’m normally a grass fed, free range kinda cook so like that’s unreal.
Anyway, the other day I was about to make butter chicken and realized I was out of butter. Which is fine actually because strangely butter chicken has little to no butter in it.
Who knew?
Fun fact: Butter chicken’s proper name is Murgh Makhani — and makhani literally means “buttery.” But “buttery” here doesn’t mean floating in butter. It means rich, silky, and smooth, mostly accomplished with cream.
My South Asian friends can correct me if I’m wrong lol
Anyway, Butter chicken or not, I did need butter and also I could use some more naan and I needed some milk too so I headed to the grocery store. I checked out the sales and saw tubes of 3lb ground beef were on sale. I was out of ground beef, and I’m like seriously grocery prices though, so I put the tube in my basket.
I also got my milk and butter, some cilantro, 2 cans of dog food, a bag of dog treats and some carrots I think.
$56.
I stood there thinking about those “$50 feeds my family for a week” videos and whispered to myself, what the actual hell.
So I had a good chat with my friend ChatGPT about grocery prices, as one does. She was like well you can probably make 5 meals out of this.
I was like ummm NO Brenda, we are a 1.5-2 lbs of ground beef per meal kind of family.
This is like the time she thought I could serve one rotisserie chicken to my family of 5 and still have leftovers for a second meal. Silly AI lol
But then I started to think about it and I was like, ok, maybe I could make 5 meals out of this. At least 4 with the beef + a vegetarian.
So I went home, divided that beef into 4 and pulled out all the stuff in my fridge that needed to be used and scoured the pantry including my sick stash of homemade bone broth.
In under 3 hours I made:
- Beef and Barley Soup
- Meat Sauce
- Beef and Potato Vegetable Soup
- Lasagna Soup
- Chickpea Turmeric Rice
My $21 beef tube + maybe $30-$40 dollars (and that’s being generous) of other ingredients from my kitchen made 5 whole food super healthy meals. So frickin satisfying. And pretty darn close to $50.
Kirsty, Unhinged 