Kiwi mum’s budget cooking challenge goes viral on YouTube: A year’s meals for $5000

Stacey Scott is a former ambulance officer and mum of six who shares her budget cooking tips on YouTube. Photos / Stacey Scott

Many of us have grown up eating meals our parents cooked from scratch — think soups made with stock from the bones of a roast chicken, home baking and fresh vegetables from the garden. But in 2024 with the rising cost of living and high prices at the supermarket, is the art of cooking on a budget something we might be losing? One Kiwi mum has made it her mission to make sure we don’t.

Stacey Scott, a Waikato-based former ambulance officer, is the mind behind a YouTube channel called Farmers Wife Homestead, where she shares cooking and budgeting tips from her rural kitchen. Over the past few years, she’s regularly shared cooking videos there, but it wasn’t until a back injury forced her to retire from her full-time job last year that she decided to give it her all.

“I had a lot more time on my hands, and I really wanted to do something, and I’d seen so many overseas YouTubers putting out great content, but there was nobody really doing it in New Zealand with our local products and knowledge, so I thought, ‘oh well, I’ll do it’,” she tells the NZ Herald.

And while Scott admits with a laugh that she “absolutely hates” being on camera, her videos clearly resonate with viewers, who hail from all over the world. A quick scroll through the comments shows hundreds of people thanking her for sharing her tips. She now has a following of more than 16,400 subscribers — something she can’t quite get her head around. “It’s very, very rewarding... it’s surreal.”

Cooking on a budget is nothing new for Scott, who together with her husband Karl has raised six children, now adults.

“We had one income and I stayed at home and brought up the children and just basically learned how to cook from there,” she recalls. “So I’ve always been that way, but particularly now for my YouTube channel, I’m trying to get it out there. A lot of people don’t know the basics.

“I’ve had students reach out to me and say, ‘look, I’ve just left home and I’m a struggling uni student, and you’ve taught me how to cook’. Even elderly people have said the same thing and that I’m teaching them new things.”

Scott taught her own children to cook, recalling, “We used to run our own little My Kitchen Rules.

“I had three older kids and three younger kids, so one older child would take a younger child and they would be a team and then they’d have a $100 budget and they had to do a three-course meal. And so they learned how to budget and they learned how to cook, and we made it fun.”

These days, Scott acknowledges that most “people are really, really busy” and might not have the time or capacity to do the same, as most Kiwi households need two incomes just to get by. But she hopes her videos can help others learn some new life skills.

Stacey Scott is teaching people from round the world the basics of cooking from her own kitchen. Photo / Stacey Scott

It’s why she’s given herself a budget of just $5000 for food shopping for the year — that’s $116 per week, which she’s rounded up to $120.

“It’s just a challenge that I came up with for myself. I’m not saying that it’s doable for everybody, but I just wanted to see what I could do with it,” adds Scott, who shares her videos online as part of that challenge.

Scott’s budget covers fruit and vegetables, meat, and pantry staples, as she’s set out to make everything else herself, from snacks and baking to condiments like tomato sauce, mayonnaise and golden syrup.

“You look into the average supermarket trolley and there is so much processed food. There’s the cookies and the cakes and the chips and the school lunch bars... I’ve had my time doing those, but if you make them yourself, you save a lot more money,” she points out.

This year, she’s spent just $980 on groceries so far — about $140 over budget, by steering clear of supermarkets and shopping local instead.

“I just got a bee in my bonnet about a certain supermarket spending $400 million on a name change. And I thought, you know what, if they can afford to do something like that, you know, they could give back to their customers a bit more,” she says.

Scott shows viewers how to make their own golden syrup. Photo / Stacey Scott

New Stats NZ data shows that while fruit and vegetable prices have fallen 9.3 per cent in the past 12 months, supermarket food prices have increased 3.9 per cent, with overall food price inflation at 2.1 per cent for the year ending in February 2024.

Scott has set out to support local fruit and vegetable shops and butchers, with the occasional visit to a Bin Inn or a Gilmours. Because of her injury, she hasn’t been able to grow her own produce at home — but she raises chickens and pigs, the farm provides her with mutton and her husband goes hunting occasionally.

Her most popular videos include a home-made hot cross bun recipe, meal prep tips and a guide to making a week’s worth of meals from two roast chickens. But the video that’s resonated the most with viewers has to be one in which she challenges herself to cook 55 meals, from breakfasts to lunches, dinners and snacks, for just $50.

“I didn’t use cookbooks or recipes or anything. I prepared it myself, cooked with what I had in front of me. So it’s given people a lot of ideas on how to make the ingredients stretch more,” she explains.

Scott has always been a “big believer” in bulk buying. “For instance, if my toothpaste was on special, I wouldn’t buy just one. I’d buy three or four to get me through, you know, six months to a year.”

Scott challenged herself to spend just $50 on ingredients for 55 meals. Photo / Stacey Scott

So when it comes to cupboard staples, what are the basic products she thinks every Kiwi needs in their pantry?

“I’d say bulk flour, bulk sugar, because if you’ve got bulk sugar and molasses, you can make brown sugar. You can make caster sugar, you can make icing sugar, just from your white sugar. So if you’re only buying that one white sugar, you don’t have to then spend more on the other sugars,” she says.

The other staples she swears by are herbs and spices, a good olive oil, and tinned tomatoes.

“You can buy a can of tomatoes, plain tomatoes, for 89 cents for the budget one. If you are doing a pasta sauce, you can buy a bottle of pre-made pasta sauce for probably $4 — with your herbs and spices, you can take that 89-cent can and you can turn that into pasta sauce by adding the herbs and spices yourself,” she shares.

“So it’s little things like that — little tricks like that help you save a lot of money.”

Bethany Reitsma is an Auckland-based journalist covering lifestyle and entertainment stories who joined the Herald in 2019. She specialises in telling Kiwis’ real-life stories, money-saving hacks and anything even remotely related to coffee.