Healthy Breakfast Lunch & Dinner Bowls with The Domestic Geek! Collab - Mind Over Munch

Hey friends. Welcome if you are new. I'm Alyssia. The American Foundation for Children with AIDS reached out to me and asked me to participate in a campaign to help bring awareness to the hunger epidemic in Africa and the extreme poverty line which is defined by the World Bank as living on a dollar and ninety cents or less per day. They asked me to create three recipes that are feed one compliant meaning all three meals for the day, breakfast, lunch and dinner can be made with less than a dollar and ninety cents. It was definitely a challenge but I am so excited to share what I've come up with. Not only is this a great cause that can use all of our help and support, I know we all like to find ways to save money on our healthy lifestyles and today I get to share some of those tips with you too. The first recipe that I am sharing is my banana oat pancakes and you really only need two ingredients and I'll bet you can guess what they are. Bananas and oats. Now if you count water I guess it's technically three ingredients. Add your ingredients into your blender and blend it on up. It will become a nice fairly thick batter consistency. Spray down a large skillet preheated to medium to medium high heat and scoop on a little bit of your batter into a pancake shape. Once the little bubbles start to form on the side as they would with normal pancakes it is time to flip. Perfect. Repeat until you've got as many pancakes as you'd like and I like to top mine off with a little bit of peanut butter. So easy. When it comes to calculating out these recipes I know that prices are going to vary based on where you shop, where you live, if you buy bulk, etc. So I am just sharing the best prices that I could find in budget shopping areas or in bulk around me and remember that $1.90 is for the day so we are only calculating what we need for the one serving for that meal. For this breakfast recipe it's one serving and it comes out to be 55 cents which is not bad for a delicious nutritious breakfast. For lunch I am sharing a delicious and filling sweet potato curry soup and it only needs a few ingredients. Sweet potato, regular potato, onion, curry powder, coconut milk, and water. Regular white potatoes are generally a bit more affordable than sweet potato but I love the flavor of sweet potato so I am using one of each to keep this recipe lower in price. Also a lot of people think that regular old spuds are nutritional duds but regular white potatoes contain more protein than sweet potatoes and high levels of potassium, magnesium, and other vitamins and minerals. In a large pot over medium high heat spray down with a bit of cooking spray and add your onions and a little salt. Saute until they begin to turn translucent. Sauteing those onions first is going to add so much flavor to the dish and the key with using affordable ingredients and only making a few of them is making sure we take advantage of all those flavor opportunities. Then add in your potatoes, coconut milk, and curry powder. Mix well to combine. Cover and allow to stand for about 20 minutes. Remove the cover and stir. Your potatoes should be nice and soft and should easily puncture with a fork like so. Grab your immersion blender and blend it on up carefully. The soup will be hot and you don't want to fling it all over yourself. If you don't have an immersion blender you can of course transfer to your regular blender but I recommend doing it in batches. You can make this soup silky smooth or leave it chunky, whatever your heart desires. Regardless it is amazing in texture and taste. Also it's going to make your home smell really good. Option to top it off with a little bit of unsweetened coconut yogurt to keep this vegan or Greek plain yogurt or sour cream would work just as well. The price breakdown comes out to about 42 cents a serving which puts us at 97 cents for the day so far. For dinner we are making a filling one pot dish, lentils, and rice. The ingredients you will need are red lentils, basmati rice, water, garlic, cumin, cinnamon, and salt. Both lentils and rice are very affordable especially when bought in bulk and lentils are great because they are a high plant based protein option around 18 grams per cup. Beans are also cheap but I don't have the patience to rehydrate dry beans. I know it's lazy. I do the canned beans, what can I say. So today I am going with lentils because they are so easy and pretty quick. Once again start with a large pot over medium high heat. Add your lentils, water, garlic, and spices and bring to a boil. Don't add your salt yet because it can affect the cooking of the lentils. After about 25 minutes once lentils are soft you can add in your rice and salt. Bring back to a boil, turn down the heat to low and then allow to simmer for about 20 minutes. Voila! Look how yummy. A delicious and filling one pot dinner and to add a little bit of extra flavor I am topping it off with avocado. And the final price of our dinner meal is 43 cents meaning we are at $1.40 but I am actually going to give you a second serving of dinner which could be an afternoon snack or just an extra large dinner whichever you prefer but that is not only going to make use of our budget and bring us to $1.83 for the day keeping us within that budget of $1.90 with three delicious, nutritious, and filling meals but it is also going to help increase our calories for the day. So this leads me to a very important point that we need to touch on. A huge challenge for me with this Feed 1 campaign was attempting to reach recommended nutritional standards for children. So while I was able to come up with three meals that stayed within the $1.90 budget I tinkered and tinkered and was not able to come up with three meals that provided enough of each macronutrient, protein, carbs, and fat. In any scenario I tried we are going to be short in something including calories and this begs another issue. So not only can these kids not afford to eat, the money that they are able to budget isn't nearly enough to provide a truly nutritious meal and that is a problem. I tried to add in some more calorie and fat dense items to boost the nutrition like the coconut milk and avocado but overall this would just barely be enough for someone for a day sufficiently and that's why it's so important that we help this organization reach its goal to help feed children affected by AIDS. They will be hosting a challenge in September where you can try to eat for $1.90 per day for a week and donate the remainder of what you would have spent on groceries for the week but remember if you take that challenge keep your nutritional health in mind. Even if you can't take the challenge I do encourage you to support through a donation and I will be too and I will put a link in the description box below if you want more information. Thank you so much for watching. I hope that this brought some awareness to the American Foundation for Children with AIDS and that you enjoyed the recipes and got a few budget friendly tips from this video. If you could thumbs up the video and share it to help spread the word that would be amazing. I will see you next week for a brand new episode and remember it's all a matter of Mind Over Munch.