Easy Dollar Tree Dinner Idea That the Whole Family Will Love

My daughter and I went down all the main food aisles to think of some dinner ideas for feeding our family of three and my parents with their household of four. 

I really wanted to keep it to six items so that the meal costs $7.50, and this would make each meal about 93 cents per serving.

I know that you won't always get the best price at Dollar Tree, but I wanted to point out a few things that I feel are excellent value.

Dollar Tree value foods

Egg noodles are a great one to get at Dollar Tree. They are 16 cents less per the same 20-ounce package versus Walmart.

The Texas Toast is another great deal at Dollar Tree because it's 20 cents per slice, while at Walmart, it's 41 cents a slice for the cheapest box. That's over 50% in savings.

The gnocchi and the ready-made gnocchi pasta are more than a dollar cheaper at Dollar Tree versus Walmart, and the tostadas are also a great deal at Dollar Tree. 

Our ingredients for dinner

Let's see what we picked up. I went back and forth a lot in the store, thinking about making a soup or some sort of rice and veggie dish. 

We landed on this. I think this will give us the most bang for our buck. 

All of these ingredients were $7.50, and I should be able to make seven portions of dinner, and that will feed my family for dinner for $7.50.

I also bought cookies because they look delicious. 

This is not part of the dinner, but if you want a quick dessert, it has six good cookies in it.

1. Cook the pasta and heat the sausage

Let's get cooking. I'm getting some water boiling on the stove with some salt.

Once it was ready, I dumped my pasta in.

I break my spaghetti noodles in half. We're also going to heat some sausage while the pasta is cooking. 

Look at how much protein is in each serving of pasta. There are seven grams of protein in the pasta. Overall, when you consider all the other ingredients for this meal, there are about 14 grams of protein per serving and about 470 calories.

I heated the bread and the veggies according to the package instructions, and once the pasta was done, I drained it.

2. Make the sauce

Next, we're going to make our pink sauce by using the spaghetti sauce and Alfredo and mixing it together.

Alfredo adds some richness and creaminess, and then it pairs really well with the tomato flavor, garlic, and spaghetti sauce herbs.

If you've never tried this combination of sauces before, I highly recommend it. 

3. Serve with veggies and Texas Toast

Once everything was mixed, we served this on some plates with the bread and veggies.

There were enough veggies for everybody, but not everybody wanted veggies. Some people got more than initially planned, but here are a few plates. 

What I did with the sausage was I crumbled it up and then placed it on top of each of the plates.

That way, if you wanted sausage, you could have some. If you didn't want sausage, you didn't have to put it on there.

Everybody was able to get some of that as well for their pasta to add some additional protein to the meal.  

We had to eat in shifts so that way one person was kind of monitoring the child eating while everybody else ate. So you won't see everybody in one shot, but there were seven meals to be had.

Everyone seemed to enjoy my Dollar Tree dinner idea, and it was fun to tell them all that all of the ingredients came from Dollar Tree.

People often don't think that you can make something from Dollar Tree, so it was a pleasant surprise for them. 

4. Extra dessert

Once we were done eating, I decided to make cookies, which was not included in the $7.50 budget, but we really wanted to test 

those out.

I baked them according to the package instructions: Cook them at 325 for about 10 minutes. I just put them on my cookie sheet and popped them into the oven.

They needed longer than 10 minutes. I think I cooked them for about 14 minutes, just based on the temperature and the consistency of the cookies. 

The taste of the cookies is pretty good. The texture is not like what I remember, but that's okay.

I would just not follow their baking instructions. I think the temperature is a little bit too low. Maybe setting the oven to 350 or 400 degrees and baking them for less time would be a lot better.  

Dollar Tree dinner ideas

I hope this motivated you to create Dollar Tree dinner ideas of your own.

Have you made meals from Dollar Tree that you liked? Share your recipes in the comments below.