$5 DINNERS: QUICK & AFFORDABLE MEALS: BUDGET FRIENDLY: 5 INGREDIENTS OR LESS

Hey guys, it's Abby. Welcome back to my channel. I am excited to share with you my new series today. This is called $5 dinners and once a month I'm going to be sharing with you $5 dinners that you can cook at home for your family. So all of these meals are obviously very affordable, but they're not going to be junky meals. I'm going to try to make these healthy for you. These are also going to be meals that you can substitute certain items if you want to change it up for your family. All of these meals are going to be $5 maybe a little less or $5 and some change. I am starting off this series with five of my family's favorite meals that I have cooked for the past five years. So we've almost been married for five years. My husband and I, we both got married when we were around the age of 20 and like most 20 year olds who are getting married, you usually don't have a lot of money. So these were meals that I learned to cook for us whenever we didn't have the most money. So you can definitely do this if you are in the same position or you can just do this to save some money. Not all of these meals include meat in this video. So if you are a vegetarian, you can take out the meat that are in some of these meals and save yourself some money because meat usually costs the most. So some of these meals are going to be vegetarian for you. That's enough talking for now. Let's get into the video. These are five $5 dinners that you can make at home for your family. Okay guys, I did want to mention that all of the ingredients in this video I personally bought in Aldi. Some of them I already had on hand that are from Walmart. You know, it's miscellaneous. However, for the video I purposely planned all this according to the prices at Walmart. So you can look down in the description box. I'm going to have every meal broken up by the prices at Walmart because Walmart is found everywhere. I thought about doing it on Aldi because Aldi is the cheapest usually, but not everyone has an Aldi. So ingredients and directions below with the prices. All right, so for this meal, this is one of my all time favorites. My mom taught me this meal. This is basically just like a Cajun sausage and rice, but I start this out with cooking bell pepper in the skillet and usually I have onion on hand, so I will throw that in there, but I'm just chopping up one bell pepper, pretty small, not too tiny, but you just do whatever you prefer. And I'm going to toss it into the skillet with some onion and let this simmer and brown for five to 10 minutes and then cooking my sausage. So I'm going to start by cutting it. I like to slice my sausage in half and then cut it up just because I have small children and if I leave them in links in like the circles, my kids will choke on the casing. So now I'm going to just throw this into the pan with my bell peppers and onion and continue to let this cook. Now this meat is already cooked, so you're just going to cook it more. You don't have to worry about this being raw meat, but I always throw in uncle Chris's seasoning onto everything, so that's what I'm throwing on and here's what it looks like so far. So just letting everything cook together, but now I'm going to throw on diced tomatoes. So diced tomatoes, Rotel petite diced tomatoes, any of those will work and I'm going to throw those in, let it cook for a little bit more and I'm going to throw in rice. So earlier in the video I had one bag of rice. I cooked it all just to have the rest for another meal, but I'm just going to throw in half a bag and it's already cooked. I let this boil, mix it together, add in any of your favorite seasonings and you are done. The second meal that I have for you is ravioli. Now this actually ends up turning out to taste like a lasagna, but first of all, I just layer the pan with spaghetti sauce and make sure it's got one good coating and then I'm just going to take my frozen ravioli and start layering it into the pan. Now once I have one full layer, I'm going to top it with mozzarella cheese. If you have Parmesan, you can add it in too. Then I'm going to layer in some more spaghetti sauce and then I'm going to continue this layer of ravioli cheese sauce until I've used up all of my sauce and make sure when you get to the bottom of the sauce jar you add in just a little bit of water, shake it up and add in the remainder. So I threw this into the oven on 400 for about 25 minutes and it was perfectly cooked. I'm going to top it off with mozzarella, let this cool for a little bit and my kids love this meal. We eat it pretty much once a month and I always pair it with green beans. The third meal is beans and rice. Now if you are a true follower, then you saw this meal a couple of weeks ago on my $5 dinner preview. This was a video I was trying out, but basically I take my beans, rinse them off, throw them in a crock pot with Rotel or diced tomatoes and then eight cups of water. I don't soak my beans overnight. There's not really any need to. If you're going to let it cook all day, you just need to make sure you have enough liquid. Now I throw in beef bouillon cubes and if I have bacon on hand, I will throw in bacon and give it a good stir and I'm going to let this cook on low eight hours all day. Now I am just throwing together my cornbread. This is the Jiffy cornbread mix. It is very inexpensive, about 50 cents a box. All you need is milk and one egg for this, so I'm just preparing it and putting it in my pan so that I can place in the oven. This only takes about 10 minutes to cook, so don't get busy doing something else cause it will burn very easily. Now I already had rice cooked from the previous meal, so I just used that, took my beans, topped it off with cheese and cornbread and it's all done. My family loves this as well. The next meal is ground turkey tacos. I've been doing this for quite some time. Sometimes I use ground beef, but I've used ground turkey in this video since it is very inexpensive. Now I'm making my own taco seasoning out of ground onion powder, garlic powder, cumin, chili powder, and cayenne. I will try to link a recipe down below for you. It saves a lot of money not having to buy taco packets, but I chopped up a bell pepper, added it with my meat. I'm going to throw in corn and black beans and I'm just going to let this simmer on the stovetop for a little bit and really that is all. This is the mixture that it ends up making. The cayenne gives it a little bit of a pop, but you can totally use this as tacos. You can just use rice and not go the taco route or you can just use it with chips and salsa. So very inexpensive and an easy meal for you to throw together. And the last meal is sausage and potatoes. We do that make this one quite often as well, but I bought a bag of potatoes for this, but you can buy a potato at Walmart, a large one for 48 cents a piece. So if you just buy two or three, that is plenty. I'm not going to peel them. You can make your potatoes however you want. You can do mashed potatoes. You can just boil them. I like to throw them in the oven and my kids like to eat them kind of like hash browns in a way, but I like to line my pan so I don't have to clean up. I throw my potatoes on top, making sure to add olive oil. If you don't have olive oil, your potatoes are not going to cook. They're just going to get crispy. So olive oil. And then of course I'm going to throw uncle Chris's steak seasoning on top of these potatoes, throw them in the oven at 450 degrees for 30 minutes. And then after 30 minutes, you're going to get them out again. So here's the sausage from earlier. Same kind, but I'm just going to cut it up in small slices so that my kids don't choke. And even then I will cut them smaller for them. This I'm going to throw on the skillet with a little bit of olive oil, throw the meat in and let it Brown and cook. It's already cooked meat. I'm going to let it cook some more. I'm going to throw them with these green beans in the microwave while I'm cooking. Give this a good shake every couple of minutes. And then I'm going to top it with barbecue sauce. This whole bottle of barbecue sauce at Walmart is 98 cents. I actually already had this on hand, but if you wanted to buy the real thing, only 98 cents and you can use as much or little as you want. Stir it around, let it cook some more with the sauce on it and it's delicious. Great for little kids too. So after the 30 minutes of cooking, I'm stirring it, making sure the olive oil is still as much as I need it to be. I'm going to put it back in the oven for about 20 more minutes and then it is done. So last meal for you. I hope that you enjoyed. Thanks so much for watching guys. I hope that you enjoyed. Let me know down in the comments, would you watch this if it had a theme to it? Italian $5 dinners, Mexican food, $5 dinners, $5 desserts. What do you want to see from me next? Let me know in the comments. Thanks so much for watching. I will see you again next time. Bye everyone.