Times are tough. Feeding a #frugal family of six is expensive especially with gas and food prices increasing with inflation. Normally we try to feed our family #farm fresh eggs and tasty produce from our homestead garden, but we wanted to challenge ourselves to see how #frugal we good be buying everything from #Aldi before our homestead garden comes in.
On our road to becoming homesteaders we pinched all of our pennies and learned a thing or two about stretching our dollar. We also have the homestead skills to make our own bread, tortillas and english muffins and more.
So we challenged ourselves- could we feed our family of six, for one week a delicious homestead breakfast for under $20? That’s 6 people multiplied by 7 days or in other words 42 homestead breakfast for under $20. That is under $0.47 cents per meal! Normally we would use eggs from our chickens, produce from our garden but for this challenge we did not allow that and used only our $20 worth of purchased groceries.
We created a list and started shopping around. We have a local Aldi and the prices and selection seemed doable within our tight budget. Our strategy was to focus on cheap made from scratch staples. We started by buying a bag of flour for $1.15 and a package of yeast for $0.89. This would provide us with homemade bread, cinnamon buns, english muffins and tortillas all for around 10% of the entire budget! Here are some items we purchased below AND we breakout precise costs in the video for each meal!
All Purpose Flour
Yeast
10lb Russet Potatoes
Premium Sausage
4 Dozen Large Eggs
Instant oatmeal
Original pancake syrup
Cinnamon
Powdered suger
Pure vanilla
* Grand Total $16.29 SEE the video for breakout per meal!
To stretch our budget we started on day zero by preparing a bunch bread, cinnamon buns, english muffins and tortillas using our flour and yeast. Please watch the video to see the meals in all of their glory but here is a quick summary:
Day 1. Meals 1-6. Egg sandwiches
Day 2. Meals 7-12. Cinnamon bread
Day 3. Meals 13-18. Simple Oatmeal
Day 4. Meals 19-24. French toast and some powdered sugar along with some syrup
Day 5. Meals 25-30. Sausage Egg tacos with some potatoes
Day 6. Meals 31-36. Omelettes, Leftovers, Cinnamon buns, Simple Oatmeal, French toast
Day 7. Meals 37-42. Broccoli Quiche
Overall we had 7 days of delicious meals. The homemade bread was 10 times better than store bought bread! We also made tortillas and Alyssa had a blast making them… and again, they tasted way better over store bought tortillas.
Overall we were amazed with how well these meals turned out on such a tight budget. It was a lot of extra work making everything from scratch but well worth the effort. All of these meals could have been improved by adding some homestead flair.
If your homestead is looking to stretch your meal budget, you can really go a long way and still enjoy some amazing breakfasts especially if you are willing to cook them from scratch and can compliment them with produce from your own homestead.
Chapters:
0:00 Start Video
2:20 Aldi Grocery Haul
5:29 Bread, cinnamon bread and english muffins, Tortillas Prep
8:57 Day 1 Egg sandwiches
11:20 Day 2 Cinnamon Buns
13:16 Day 3 Simple oatmeal
14:21 Day 4 French Toast
16:23 Day 5 Breakfast Tacos
18:37 Day 6 Leftovers
25:11 Day 7 Broccoli Quiche
Cut these recipes down for as many as you need…
No Kneed Bread:
https://alexandracooks.com/2012/11/07/my-mothers-peasant-bread-the-best-easiest-bread-you-will-ever-make/
English Muffins:
https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/english-muffins-recipe
Best Ever Cinnamon Rolls:
https://www.twopeasandtheirpod.com/recipe-for-cinnamon-rolls/#wprm-recipe-container-42397