I challenged myself to make high-protein vegan meals as cheaply as possible using only ingredients from Aldi and the dollar store! In this video, I meal prep four delicious dishes: a Thai peanut tofu stir-fry, an enchilada pie, a hearty soup, and a pineapple cake with tofu ricotta. I break down the costs, share cooking tips, and show you how to make budget-friendly meals without sacrificing nutrition. Let me know what you think of this new filming style, and don’t forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for more vegan fitness content!
Transcript:
We are going to see how inexpensive we can get some of these high protein vegan meals.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the channel. My name is Dani Taylor, co-owner of Vegan Proteins Online Coaching, and today I am making meal prep using only foods that I got from Aldi’s or the dollar store.
I wanted to see how inexpensive I can get some high protein vegan meals. This is all sort of off of the cuff. I went to the store, I saw what they had, I tried to get inspired, and now we’re making the meals.
If you’re looking for ways to level up your physique as a vegan, make sure that you hit the subscribe button because we put out videos every week to help you do just that without any of the fluff. I’m also trying out a different video style this week, so let’s see how that goes. Alright, here is my grocery store haul from Aldi and the dollar store.
I’m going to be making these recipes assuming that you have things like spices, oils, vinegar, stuff like that already on hand. We’re going to be starting making a Thai peanut dish, and I’m going to be using one of the full blocks of tofu I got from Aldi for $1.99. Cutting it into cubes, salting it fairly generously, and tossing it in the air fryer at 380 degrees for 25 minutes. While that’s cooking, I’m getting a big wok ready with about a tablespoon and a half of olive oil, and I’m going to throw in some of these frozen veggies I got from the dollar store for $1.25 each.
Some peppers and onions, some broccoli, and some peas and carrots, which for some reason were not $1.25, they were one cent. Now this is a bit different, I’m throwing in a whole bag of dry roasted edamame. I wasn’t sure how this was going to work, but I just kind of let it go for a while after I seasoned it a little bit with some salt and covered it.
And what I found was I needed to add about a cup of water to this, which I didn’t film, and that helped the edamame get nice and soft. While that is also cooking, I’m going to start making my peanut sauce, and I’m using some crunchy peanut butter. I believe this is an 8-ounce jar, and I basically used the whole thing.
I’m going to use some soy sauce. Now I didn’t measure this, I just kept adding and tasting and adding and tasting. Some sriracha, some garlic powder, some ginger powder, and then some boiling water just to get it to the right consistency.
And then as I was whisking, I would taste it and see what it needed more of, and for me it needed exactly what I just put in it all over again. So the soy sauce, the sriracha, the spices, the water, and if I was using my regular natural peanut butter, I would probably add something sweet to it, but because this is like a regular kind of generic peanut butter, it already has some sugar in it, so that came out perfect. Now the tofu is done, I’m going to add it to the wok as well as my peanut sauce, which I only used half of this whole bowl that I made.
So even though I used the whole jar of peanut butter, I only ended up using half of it. Stir it around and just heat it till it’s just heated through, and I also cooked up half of that bag of brown rice in the instant pot. Took about 12 minutes just with some salt and water, and I could not believe how good this dish came out.
Even with only half the peanut sauce, it was so rich and creamy and spicy and salty. It had a little bit of crunch from the peanuts and the peanut butter. So good.
All right, now we’re going to move on and make an enchilada pie kind of situation. So I’m using a pound of dried pinto beans that I rinsed, added a lot of water, about six cups or so, a full tablespoon of salt. Don’t worry, we’re draining most of this water off afterwards, and set it in the instant pot on the bean setting.
While that’s cooking, this is a bonus recipe here of enchilada sauce. So I’m doing three tablespoons of flour, three tablespoons of oil, heat it over medium until it is browned. Then we are adding three tablespoons of chili powder, one teaspoon of cumin, a half a teaspoon of oregano, one teaspoon of garlic, and one teaspoon of salt.
We’re going to whisk all that together. It’s going to get clumpy and dry, and then we’re going to add two cups of water, whisking as we pour it in. Let that cook for a few minutes till it starts to thicken, and then I’m going to add two tablespoons of tomato paste and a half a teaspoon of white vinegar.
Voila, homemade enchilada sauce. All right, our beans are done. I’m going to go drain off about 75 percent of that water.
I want to leave a little bit of water in there because this is going to be our refried beans. Again, we’re measuring these spices with our heart here. We have onion powder, garlic powder, cumin, and chili powder.
Pick the immersion blender. Go bananas. Now we’re going to use these cool meatless crumbles that I found at Aldi, and they’re kind of weird looking.
They look a little bit like dog food. Rehydrate with hot water similar to TVP. It had this seasoning packet, but I only used a little bit of it because I wasn’t totally sure what the flavors were going to be.
Adding a whole can of diced tomatoes and chili. Mix it up. Set it aside.
All right, now we’re going to assemble. Salsa at the bottom, corn tortillas, layers of refried beans, the meaty crumbles, and more salsa. And then just repeat until you fill this up.
I actually only used about two-thirds of my ingredients, and this made so much food. And then as a very last step, we’re topping it with that enchilada sauce we just made. Just about a half a cup or so, and then we’re popping it in the oven at 400 degrees for 40 minutes.
Now this dish came out to be 82 cents per serving. I cut it into eight servings. Remember, I still had tons of ingredients left over, and it was 480 calories per serving and 26 grams of protein.
I’m not saying that the dollar store or Aldi is the cheapest place to get food, but sometimes all you have is five or six dollars to last you till you get your next paycheck and you got to make a meal out of it. And if you’re trying to build muscle or care about your health, these are really good tricks to have up your sleeve. All right, so we are going to be making a soup here, and this is a little bit different.
So I’ve got 10 cups of water in this pot, and I’m putting a whole can of refried beans in there, and I’m just going to whisk it together. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but the beans are going to help thicken the broth here because they actually didn’t have broth. A full box of this chickpea rotini, a full box of those meatless grounds again, a can of diced tomatoes with the juice, a can of sliced potatoes.
I did drain these. The rest of my peas, peppers and onions, and broccoli, and then generously seasoned because like I said, there’s no broth in there. And all I added was salt at the beginning.
I tasted it towards the end to see what other kinds of seasonings that it needed, and I ended up adding garlic powder and a decent amount of rosemary. And this gave this dish outstanding flavor, and this one came out to be $1.30 per serving, and it made 10 servings that were each 300 calories and 20 grams of protein. So this was our most expensive of our four meals here, but it was also the least effort.
I basically just dumped everything into a pot and ignored it until it was cooked through. And the last dish we’re going to do is a dessert. This one is another one that I just made up off the top of my head.
This is going to be a pineapple cake with tofu ricotta. And again, I’m not saying these are the healthiest meals on earth. Obviously, the dollar store in Aldi is not a health food store, but you know, we make do with what we have.
So that was a full box of the cake mix, and I added a half a cup of gluten, a full can of pineapple tidbits with the juice. I wish they had them diced smaller, but they didn’t. Half a cup of applesauce, which I got from the dollar store, vanilla that we measure with our hearts, and a cup of water.
And I am just going to use my little blender to blend this together until it’s this consistency. Kind of hard to work around the pineapple, but it worked. And I put it in an 8×8 dish that I sprayed with a little cooking spray, and put it in the oven at 350 degrees for 40 minutes.
While that’s going, we’re going to make our tofu ricotta. A full block of this ricotta, this is a quarter cup of sugar, vanilla, and about a teaspoon of lemon juice. Now this is extra firm, so even though when I start blending this, it looks like it took me 10 seconds, it took more like seven minutes.
You just let that food processor go on high until it is as smooth as you can get it. So there’s still a tiny bit of grain left to it, even when it’s fully, fully blended, but I think that’s what makes it kind of feel like ricotta. Look how creamy and thick and delicious this looks.
I let this cake cool for several hours before I cut it, and this made huge portions of dessert, so you could definitely make these smaller. So it came into eight cute little triangles, and we definitely had enough ricotta to top all of them. And then as I was plating it, I got this great idea.
I had a can of cherries. You don’t have to add these, but I really liked what it added to it. Can of cherries, so I added some cherries and some juice to it, and oh my god, this was so delicious.
This came out to be 68 cents per serving, and each of these huge servings was 360 calories and 11 grams of protein. Again, not super high protein, but it is a dessert, and it was a super fun way to end the night. Jacopo really enjoyed it.
All right, guys. Well, thank you so much for tuning into this video. I hope you like the new filming style.
Let me know in the comments down below. If there’s any kind of meal prep video you’d like to see, also let us know. And of course, if you are a vegan looking for any kind of fitness or nutrition coaching, that’s what we do here at Vegan Proteins.
That’s what we’ve been doing since 2008. Definitely check out the links in the description below. If you like the video, like the video, subscribe, hit the bell, all the things I’m supposed to tell you to do at the end of a YouTube video, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Bye.
