VEGAN MEAL PREP FOR $20 (FULL WEEK OF FOOD!)

And we are back. Yes, we are back with the $20 meal prep challenge. My $20 meal prep challenge video is, I think, my most viewed video of all time, which is crazy. And if you haven't seen it, I'll leave a link to it down below. And a lot of people have requested that I do another one of these, so here we are again. This time, though, there's going to be a few slight changes, okay? So instead of spending $20 Canadian dollars, which is what I did last time, I'm going to be spending the equivalent of $20 American dollars. I just figured, number one, most of my viewership is in the U.S. Number two, when people say, like, dollars, usually they mean, like, American dollars. I'm not saying that the world revolves around the U.S., okay? But I'm just saying, like, I'm just trying to give myself more money. Okay. So we're going to spend $27 Canadian dollars, which is the equivalent of $20 American dollars, because Canadian dollar, not doing so hot right now, okay? And last time, a few people got mad at me. Well, maybe they didn't get mad at me, but they were like, what the hell? Because I called the video a full week meal prep, even though I only did five days worth of food. I just figured, like, you know, when people meal prep for a week, they don't usually make seven days worth of food. When I say weekly meal prep, I usually mean five days of food. But this time, I got you, I'm going to try to do seven days. So I'm going to do seven full days of food. $27 Canadian, $20 American, seven days worth of food, and 100% vegan, let's go. Alright guys, so I went grocery shopping, and it's been actually a couple of days, and I actually ended up spending a little over $27, just because, because it's really hard to like estimate when you have to weigh things, like when you buy like vegetables and stuff. But essentially what happened was I actually spent $27.62, yeah. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to omit something that I bought, which was an onion. I bought an onion, an onion, and it costs $0.91 for one onion. I feel like that's a lot. I'm going to just take that out because I feel like it's not really necessary, so yeah. Alright, so I'm going to start making food, and hopefully it turns out. I honestly, I don't even know what I'm making yet, so. So here are my very special purchases. I bought some black turtle beans, of course you have to have beans. I also got myself a tub of peanut butter, yay, smooth peanut butter. Of course I couldn't get myself the natural, just peanuts peanut butter, because that stuff is more expensive. I also got some frozen vegetables, which are always handy to have. One kilogram of quick whole grain oats. Bananas, yes, I did ripen them, you know. I bought this stuff a few days before I actually filmed this video. Got myself a can of tomato sauce. 900 grams of green lentils. Some long grain brown rice. I also got some fancy spaghetti, actually. I was going to get cheaper spaghetti, but this was only like 20 cents more, and this one has omega-3, so I just thought it's healthier. Some soy sauce. A pretty big sweet potato. Fortified soy milk. And kale. Before we get started with the meal prep, I want to let you guys know that this video is supported by audible.com, and if you guys don't know audible, they are an online audio book store. They've got tons of different audio books that you can download straight onto your device, whatever device you are using, and it is so handy, especially for those of you guys that may want to read, but maybe you're running around, or you're driving, or something like that. It really helped me when I got my laser eye surgery, which I did a couple weeks ago, and I couldn't look at my phone, I couldn't look at anything really, so I just listened to audio books. And the one that I'm listening to right now is called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, and it's quite interesting, and it's quite insightful, so check it out. And if you guys want to get yourself a free audio book, I will leave a link to a one month trial and a free audio book down below. And without further ado, let's get started with the meal prep. The first thing I like to do when I meal prep is I like to cook up whatever's going to take the longest. So I'm cooking up the lentils on my stove here, and I also made the rice in my rice cooker, and my rice cooker actually has a little steamer thing that you can add on top. So what I did with that was I added this sweet potato, so that I could steam the sweet potato while the rice was cooking, so you can get two things done at once. And while the rice and lentils are cooking, and also the beans I believe, while everything is cooking, you want to prepare your vegetables and other little things that you might need to chop. So I'm just chopping up the kale here, and just preparing whatever I can prepare. Alright, let's just make a very simple sweet potato cake thing that I made up. So I'm just taking some oats, and I'm just blending it to make an oat flour. And now I'm just mashing up some sweet potato. This ended up being around one cup of sweet potato, and I honestly would have liked to use more, but you know, I wanted to save some sweet potato for later. And I decided to also add half a banana for extra sweetness, but I don't know, next time I might try making this without a banana, because I feel like the banana flavor kind of overtook everything, but I don't know. This was just me trying things out, okay? And we're going to add half a cup of soy milk, and just try to mix that together. And we also added one and a half cups of oat flour, and then we're just going to, yeah, mix that well. So we've got sweet potato, we've got oat flour, we've got banana, and we have soy milk. And I'm just going to lay that out on parchment paper on a baking sheet. And I made them a little bit big because I wanted to have these for breakfast, kind of like as like a breakfast cake, but of course you can have these as snacks as well. And we are also going to make some cookies. We're making three ingredient cookies. We are taking some oats here. I'm using two cups of oats. I'm also going to add one and a half ripe bananas, and six tablespoons of peanut butter. Now, you can use as much or as little peanut butter as you want. You don't even have to add peanut butter, but I wanted to add it for some added fat so that, you know, you stay full for a bit longer, and plus this actually tasted so good because peanut butter is life! And now you're going to shape them into beautiful little cookies, and you are going to place them on another baking sheet that is covered with parchment paper. And then, yeah, that's pretty much it. So these can be eaten for breakfast even, or as a snack. So now you've got two different options for breakfast or snack. And of course, I even decided to put a little bit of extra peanut butter on top of the cookies just to make them a little bit more interesting. And then we are going to bake these in a preheated oven along with those sweet potato cakes that we made earlier. We're just going to bake them in the same oven because that's how I roll. So here's another breakfast option. I'm making overnight oats. I know it's basic, guys, but seriously, it's just easy and affordable, so I'm just going to make it okay. I'm just adding some soy milk into three jars. So I'm not going to make any more than three just because I feel like it's going to get bad. So I feel like three is already pushing it, so yeah. I'm just adding two tablespoons of peanut butter into each jar. And then you are just going to mix that well together. Okay, I just wanted to mix it a little bit before putting in the oats. And now we can add the oats. Yay! Once you've added the oats, mix that well, very, very well. And I'm going to top it with some banana slices. And you can do this, honestly, the day before or the day of. You can just bring a banana or something. But I just did this so you guys can see how I made it. And I know, it's not pretty at all. It's actually pretty ugly, but you know, whatever. Okay, we're going to make some bean balls. Yay! So I'm adding some black beans into the food processor along with some lentils. And like I said, these are all cooked now because I cooked it all. We're also adding some rice and we are going to process it and just kind of let it blend together. And then we're going to add it into a big mixing bowl. I also added some sweet potato in there to add a little bit more flavor that was probably equivalent of maybe a cup or something, whatever I had. And then I'm also adding some tomato sauce to add more flavor. And of course, we're going to also add some soy sauce. And just mix that well until everything is very well combined. And we are going to bake again. We are taking a baking sheet with parchment paper and we are going to make little balls out of this bean and rice and whatever mixture that we have and just place them. You know how it is. And then I just baked them at 300 degrees, nope, not 300, 350 degrees Fahrenheit for approximately an hour and I did flip them halfway through and these actually turned out very good. So, yeah, they were super yummy. Okay, now we're going to make a pasta sauce but instead of just using tomato sauce, we're going to make it a little bit more interesting because I like things interesting, okay? We're adding some peanut butter in there. I know that sounds weird but I swear this was actually really good. Maybe because I'm just addicted to peanut butter, I don't know. But it was good. And, you know, I don't have many things to flavor things with so I'm going to have to be a bit creative. I'm adding some soy sauce in there, of course. And we're just going to blend that up. And this will just make the sauce a little bit more creamy and also give it some more fat and protein so it'll keep you fuller for longer, yes. And the pasta is already cooked up and I just added the sauce on top of the pasta and tossed it. You guys know the drill. We're going to prepare some sides because sides are awesome. And so we're just cooking up the frozen vegetables. I'm adding a little bit of salt, okay, and then we're just going to cook that up. It's basically just simple frozen vegetables. And we're also going to make a little bit of a kale side dish kind of thing. Honestly, I would have just eaten it like cooked like that with a little bit of salt but I decided to add some soy sauce and just a little splash of tomato sauce to make it a little bit more interesting. Like I said, I like things interesting. Now this is the fun part. This is when we can kind of assemble the bento box and make it look kind of pretty and yeah. Here we go. We're just adding the, you know, bean balls, the vegetables, we're also adding the spaghetti and I'm going to just top it with a little bit of that kale. Look how pretty! Yay! Okay, here's another option for you because I had so much rice left and so many lentils. We're going to just take a bit of the rice, a bit of the lentils, mix that up with a little bit of soy sauce and then I'm going to top it with some of the pasta sauce that I had left over and on the side we've got the kale and the bean balls. So basically it's just about making sides, making mains and just kind of putting it together in whatever way you want to, okay? Now we're just going to make a peanut butter stir fry kind of thing. We're just taking some peanut butter and some soy sauce and then I tried to mix it together with a spoon but it actually ended up looking really gross and clumpy so I just put it in my food processor and just let that do the work. And then on a frying pan, I am just adding a little bit of water and just cooking up the frozen vegetables. Also going to add some lentils in there as well as some of the black beans and then some kale and this is when I told myself I needed to get a bigger frying pan, possibly a wok. I need a wok. And then yeah, we're just going to add that peanut butter soy sauce mixture. Now in an ideal world, I would have liked to add some maple syrup but that wasn't in my budget guys so I couldn't add it. But this was still really good. Alright, we're going to make some bean and lentil patties now. We are just taking some lentils and some black beans. We're going to process that and then once that's nicely mashed and processed, I'm adding some oat flour and also adding some regular lentils that I haven't mashed up and then I'm just going to mix that well together. And guess what guys? We're adding some soy sauce. Surprise! We're also going to add some tomato paste or tomato sauce and mix that well together. Adding a little bit more oat flour at a time just based on the consistency that I want. Let's show you guys what I made. So we've got spaghetti here, the sauce is made from tomato sauce, peanut butter and soy sauce and then we've got this bean ball, lentil ball, whatever you want to call it. Some veggies, we've got rice with some patties, some veggies, we've got rice with the peanut butter and soy sauce kind of stir fry vegetable and then of course we can just kind of mix and match here and there. We've got 1, 2, 3, 4, focus, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. There are 14 main meals so you can mix and match for lunch and dinner and then for breakfast again we've got the three overnight oats, peanut butter cookies, we also have sweet potato cakes and then there's more oats. There's also still more soy milk left, we've got more bananas, we've got more peanut butter so plenty of food here. So this is how much food I made with only 20 US dollars. There are definitely more than enough calories for the week for one person. I had tons of food left over so I had like tons of black beans, I also had lots of lentils left over. I actually didn't even cook like half the lentils and I also had a lot of rice left, some spaghetti left, I also had some oats left, I mean tons of food. The only thing is that I wish I had more vegetables and fruit and I think if I did this next time I will try to get more of that. I was just really concerned because I didn't want to run out of food, I didn't want to not have enough calories so my main concern was to get foods that will fill me up which is why I got a lot of rice and beans and lentils which I know are going to fill you up. And honestly guys I challenge myself to not use any spices that I already had and try to only use whatever I could get with the 20 dollars but I think that most people probably already have some basic spices in their pantry so I do encourage you to use spices. They will just make a huge difference and probably make things taste even better. Anyways, I really hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did enjoy it, hit that like button and also let me know down below in the comments section what your thoughts are. If you are new to this channel, don't forget to click that subscribe button for more videos similar to this one and of course I will see you guys in my next video. Thank you guys so much for watching. Bye!