How to Eat for $1 a Day on an Extreme Grocery Budget

Let me start by showing you everything I got with my $10. I bought a box of crunchy taco hamburger helper, and some cauliflower mac and cheese. I bought one pound of quick grits and a pound of spaghetti. I also bought some flour tortillas, one can of tuna, and one bell pepper.

For dessert, I bought a package of Oreos and a three-pound bag of clementines.

1. Grits

To make grits, I like to start off with two cups of cold water and then add a quarter cup of grits to the cold water. Then I slowly bring that up to a boil. The box tells you to do 3 quarters of a cup of water to 3 tablespoons of grits, but I like to use more water.

I also like to add chicken bouillon powder to my grits. I find that it adds some nice flavor and makes them extra delicious. If you add the chicken bouillon while it is boiling hot it will clump up on you, so I recommend you add it at the beginning. That way it all dissolves easily.

I had some clementines on the side and it made a great breakfast. I didn’t even use all the grits. I could probably get another week of breakfasts out of that package.

2. Mac and cheese

The box of mac and cheese makes two servings so that’s two meals. One could be lunch and the other could be dinner on another day. It could also be two lunches or two dinners.

To make it I just added the pasta to three cups of water. Then I added the cheese packet and the tuna while the pasta was still cooking in the water. If you don’t like tuna, you can use a can of peas instead.

3. Crunchy taco hamburger helper and stuffed pepper

Now I will show you how I made the crunchy taco hamburger helper. For these meals, we're also going to be using the bell pepper and the tortillas. This is going to make five meals so it could be five lunches, five dinners, or a mixture of the two.

I’m not going to use any meat or any milk or anything with this. I’m just using water to make these meals super affordable. Of course, if you have milk or meat, you can add that in. I wanted to try and stick to what I purchased as much as possible to really commit to the challenge.

I sliced the bell pepper in half from top to bottom and made two stuffed peppers with it. Alternatively, you could chop it up and add it to the mixture if you wanted. I wrapped up all 10 of the tortillas and sprayed them with oil.

This left me with two burritos for three of the days and a burrito with stuffed pepper for 2 other days. If you want to mix things up differently you could have four meals of two burritos and one meal of just the two peppers. It's all up to you.

4. Vegetable soup with spaghetti

I did want to stick to the ingredients I bought for the challenge as much as possible but for these meals, I decided to add some things that I had in my fridge and my freezer so they wouldn’t go to waste. I've had these frozen carrots in my freezer forever, so it was time to use those.

I also had some celery and some bacon that needed to get used. I decided to work with what I had to make a soup. I encourage you to find ways to use things you already have so they don’t spoil and go to waste before you get a chance to use them.

I sauteed all those ingredients for a few minutes and added some Campbell's flavor-ups. I poured in about 8 to 10 cups of water along with some bouillon powder. You can season this up however you want. If you have some parmesan or another kind of cheese you can add that in as well. 

I stirred up the ingredients until I had a nice creamy soup. Then I broke my spaghetti and cooked it up to eat with the soup. This meal came out delicious.

My whole family loved this soup. I decided to share it with them even though the challenge was supposed to be meals for one person. Saving meals for just one person doesn’t really work when you have a houseful of hungry people.

This recipe made 8 servings, and I only needed 7 more meals for the challenge. That means I even got some leftovers out of this, coming in under budget with more than enough.

Extreme grocery budget

I hope that you all enjoyed this extreme grocery budget challenge. I was pleasantly surprised with both the quantity and quality of food I was able to create for just $10.

Let me know if you tried any of these budget-friendly meals. I’d love to hear how they came out for you. Leave me a comment and tell me what you thought.