Cheap Meal Prep | 2 Recipes & Full Weekly Meal Plan (Grocery Haul!)

Dear friends, welcome back. So, today I am doing something a little bit different with you. I'm taking you along for a full grocery haul and meal plan day, and we're going to go to one of my favorite budget friendly grocery stores, Aldi, or as some people like to call it Aldi. And I've noticed a trend lately that they've had so many things that are $2 or under $2 and under $3 as well. So, we're going to see how many things out of my grocery haul are under that $3 mark, and I'm confident we're going to find a lot according to their advertisements and the things they have marked down that are in season right now. Speaking of things that are in season, we're going to come back and meal prep two really simple recipes. And since a lot of berries, strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries are in season right now, I have a cheesecake berry salad. I had to think of that whole name. And then we're going to go ahead and also whip up a good chicken thigh sheet pan meal that I can eat for my lunches throughout the week. We're going to wrap everything up by going over my weekly plan for this week of dinners and give you guys some great budget friendly meal options. So, let's get going. You guys, I love Aldi. There are so many things here that are under $2 and many items under $3 that are quite literally double that cost at other grocery stores. As you can see, I'm going to try to highlight the prices as we're going through, but the strawberries were $2.09. I was literally just at another store the day before and they were $5 for the same size carton. One thing I find really helpful is if you can get a hold of the sale flyer before you go grocery shopping and sort of plan your weekly meal plan around things that are going to be on sale or things that you know are low cost. That helps a lot versus going to the store, getting a bunch of random ingredients, and then trying to put a meal plan together from those random ingredients that were on sale. I also popped into their odds and ends aisle, and I'm telling you I have found some of the best deals for my home and my family. I mean, we've even found shoes in here before, and I did find two different things for my kitchen that I will show you in the haul. As you're seeing me pick up these items at such a great price, you will see how I use them in some of the meal prep a little bit later in this video, but a shout-out to the German roasted coffee at Aldi. If you know, you know. It's imported from Germany, and it is a low acidity coffee, which is a win-win for me. Here is the haul. I even found some extra goodies that I'll show you. I did put a few things in the refrigerator like my chicken breast and chicken thighs I picked up. Instead of going through every nitty-gritty that are obvious things in this haul, I'm going to point out the things that landed under $3 and give you the prices. Organic marinara sauce at $2.19, one of my favorite drinks, the Royal Tea. I love the half and half. It's so, so good, and some places these are pretty pricey, but at Aldi they land at $1.69. So, obviously we're about to do a quick little meal prep with these, but all the berries were an amazing price, which is what I figured with them being in season. The blueberries were $2.69, strawberries were at $2.09, blackberries were $2.15, and raspberries were $1.99 a container. Something else in season right now that makes this a good price is zucchini and this was $2.21 for the pack of three. We're going to be meal prepping with Brussels sprouts today and they were $2.99 a pack. Another thing landing under $3 was this bell pepper pack at $2.69. Also, the sweet potatoes at $2.99 and this nice big bag of sweet potato fries was also $2.99. The eggs were at one of the lowest prices I have seen them in a long time is $1.46 for a dozen. Amazing. Along with that, we have the great cheese prices for Aldi. That's $1.75 and then I did find some other goodies. I needed some more glass mixing bowls, so these are great. They have lids with them and then also found a cold brew pitcher that's glass that I've been kind of keeping my eye out for. I know for sure this was like $9.99, which is a great price. We have the coleslaw at $1.89 and then the cucumbers at $0.95, which is so great. We love using these in recipes and also just eating them as a good snack. Obviously, there's more things in here and some of the things were still under $3, but I'd like to get all of this put away and we can jump right into meal prepping this really delicious berry salad, but before we do that, I'm definitely get going to get my sheet pan ready to head into the oven. Okay, taking a quick break from our meal prep to say a big thank you to Monarch for sponsoring today's video. This is actually the second time that I've worked with Monarch and anytime that I get to share a tool with you or an a product or a brand that I use in real life, it's always so exciting to me and we use Monarch all the time. One of our big goals for this year has been to stay in our budget and just really hone in on our finances, understand where our money is going and grab those things like subscriptions and things we forget about and make sure we have it all under control. And if you're someone like me who's trying to get a better grip on your finances, especially whenever we're meal planning and trying to budget grocery shop, all of those good things, you are going to love this app. Everything is in one place and that's one of the things that drew me to Monarch. All of my bills, my spending categories, and my cards are all in one clean dashboard that's super easy to understand. And I'm not bouncing between five different bank apps to figure out where our money went. The budgeting side lets you separate your fixed spending from your flexible spending. And you can customize your categories so that it matches you in real life. Like for us, we have different business expenses, homeschooling, all of that stuff, and I can customize it to what works for me. It's completely private and ad-free, which is something I like, and it connects with over 13,000 banks and institutions. Check out my link in the description box below or use my code ZUC 50 to get 50% off the Monarch core tier. Now, let's get back to our meal prep. I decided to start the sheet pan first and preheated my oven to 400° just because I knew it could roast while I worked on the berry salad. So, I like to line my sheet pans. It just helps with clean up later and these were honestly individual meals that I was making up for myself. I've been trying to make sure that I'm eating three meals a day. It doesn't always work with me. I am a busy body. I have a lot on my plate and so I am someone that tends to skip meals and so I feel like I have to prioritize just getting individual meals made up just for myself. So, what I wanted to do was some roasted chicken thighs with some veggies and I cut up that zucchini that was such a good price in store and I tossed it with the bell peppers that also came in under $3. This was such a good price point for this entire prep because I was able to get quite a few meals out of this. Along with the zucchini and bell peppers, I also wanted to do up these brussels sprouts. They just sounded so good to me this week. I was thinking through what veggies I wanted to be eating and brussels sprouts was high on my list. And I just repeated the process for all the veggies. I just cut them up into nice bite-size pieces, tossed them into olive oil, and then tossed a good seasoning mix with them. The chicken was super simple. Just put it on the pan and I put the same seasoning mix over the chicken and it did have salt in it, so it was all seasoned really well and I actually had enough of everything to do two sheet pans. Initially, I thought it was only going to be one, but once I got cutting into the veggies, I realized I had quite a bit, which was a huge score because this will make lunches that both I can eat or Corey can eat. It's a nice grab and go. All right, so let's get started in on the star of the show today, our cream cheese berry salad. I have made this before. I'm pretty sure even in a video I've made this before, but if you're someone that needs a gluten-free option or something that is low sugar, this is the way to go and you can tweak this in so many ways to make it your own, but you're going to start off with two blocks of cream cheese and a cup of heavy cream. I did actually end up adding in just a bit more heavy cream because I felt like it was just a little too thick whenever I got it all mixed together and then I used some vanilla stevia as well as some monk fruit allulose blend sweetener and I don't have a hand mixer so I just got out my immersion blender and used that to combine everything and then I wanted to give you guys an idea of how you could do a presentation with this if you were going to take it somewhere at like say a picnic or something like that. So you could mix together your berry salad and then layer the cream over the top of it and then top it off with some more berries to where you can see the cream down in in the bottom. And one of the tips I wanted to give you is if you are using different types of berries, I would really recommend sort of layering them in because the more you try to stir these berries with a spoon, the more likely you're going to end up with mushy berries and so I just kind of alternated between adding in the blueberries, the strawberries, the raspberries and the blackberries until I had a nice mixture. And here you're seeing the cream layer get added on. It is beautiful and so delicious. So if you were going to do this in like a 9 by 13, you could do it this way and then sort of let everybody scoop into it and mix together the berries and cream themselves. So I just kind of layered it up that way just for you guys to see how you could take it somewhere but then I just used a big spoon to stir it all together and oh my goodness, I promise it's as good as it looks. Both of those recipes turned out so good and I just had a nice little portion of the cream cheese berry salad. That is delicious and I think it would be such a nice healthy side to take to a picnic even over the 4th of July if you're in the US and it's got that nice red white and blue look to it as well. But if you're using the sweetener alternatives, then you know that you're not getting a ton of sugar. You could even use raw honey in that and of course because you're not cooking it, you would get all of the good benefits of the raw honey and it would be really delicious. So as I mentioned at the beginning of the video, I want to go over my weekly meal plan with you guys. I'm using my little meal plan pad from my shop and so we're going to just go through the weekdays. That's generally how I meal plan mostly because on the weekends we have a lot going on or my husband cooks a lot. So sometimes he will decide to make something on the weekends and so I just tend to stick with like the five weekdays. So we're going to go through each of those and I'll give you any prep tips if you want to try to prep ahead for the week like we've done other times. So Monday, which would be the day that I'm grocery shopping, I want to do barbecue chicken bowls, sweet potatoes and coleslaw. So you've seen me pick up some of the ingredients for that and you could slow cook the chicken throughout the day, but because I didn't have it to start off this morning, I'm just going to put it on the grill. We're going to cut it up that way and then we'll have a nice chicken bowl and I'll do it with barbecue sauce and whatnot. There is a recipe that I can link below for that. Tuesday we've been doing taco Tuesdays, so we're just going to make beef tacos. That's why I picked up like some sour cream and the street corn dip and we'll use that in with the tacos to make a nice little taco bar and to prep ahead, I have made the taco meat ahead. Wednesday we're going to do a crock pot meal with roast a beef roast with carrots I already had and potatoes I already had. So that meal is nicely covered. I didn't have to pick up anything for that. And it's a great Crock-Pot meal. We do get local beef from a butcher and a farmer. And so, it's we do have beef beef roast in the freezer that need to be used up. And I've kind of been forgetting about them here and there. And then Thursday, we're going to do chicken alfredo with broccoli. If you guys go back in other videos, you will see how I do that. It's a cream cheese base because I like to be able to thicken it without using flour since we try to eat mostly gluten-free. Friday, we'll be doing burgers with homemade french fries and green beans. Then to finish out to the weekend, we are away on Saturday and Sunday. I figured I will do some sort of soup and salad. Although, I don't have lettuce and all of that. So, we may have to stop at some point in the week and pick up fresh veggies if we're going to do salad. So, that gives you a good idea of what I plan to do through the rest of the week and what the groceries went towards. Obviously, there was little extras in there. I did pick up some gluten-free chicken bites that can be a quick lunch for whoever needs it. And obviously, we got some of the special drinks and other things in there. But, I hope that this inspires you. I know it inspired me to stick to going to grocery stores that are budget-friendly like Aldi. And I'm sure there's some that come to mind for you in your area. But, even if it's a little bit of an extra trek, it's always worthwhile when you're saving money in your overall budget. And I think that it's good right now with a lot of veggies being in season. I see a lot of things being at a really great price point. So, eat those veggies that are in season. Eat those fruits like the berries that are in season. And your budget will thank you as well. If you guys are new here, I'd like it if you subscribed. It's free and it supports my channel. I hope that this got you all ready to get your meal prep going for the week. Let me know in the comments what you're working on or maybe a new recipe that you've been loving this season with things that are in season. I'd love to hear those things from you. Give this video a like and I will see you guys in the next one.