ארוחות ממצרכים ב-40 דולר

We’re back for Part 2 of my $40 grocery challenge from 2023!

If you missed Part 1, I recently started revisiting some of my older videos and recipes to see how they hold up today. That brought me back to a challenge where I started with $40 cash and went to Dollar General every day, buying just a few new ingredients and using whatever I had left from the day before to make dinner for two.

This time, I bought the SAME grocery list (or as close as I could get) for roughly the same $40 budget, but I had all of the ingredients in front of me from the beginning. The challenge was to see if three more years of cooking experience could help me turn those same ingredients into an entirely different rotation of meals.

And now that I've finished...I think the original challenge wins. 😂

This version was a GREAT exercise in creativity, but it wasn't necessarily better at stretching the food. Some meals were delicious, some were just okay, one ingredient nearly ruined an otherwise decent soup, and two of my most creative meals only made ONE serving instead of dinner for two.

But I loved seeing what else these ingredients could become. Hash browns became homemade tater tots. Flour tortillas became crispy tortilla strips and chips. Pork & beans became breakfast nachos. Leftovers that didn't seem like enough for another meal became ingredients for something completely different.

The original challenge showed me how to make my groceries stretch. This one taught me how to look at them d