Cheap, Healthy & Delicious: 4 Easy Dinners Anyone Can Make | Dr. Mark Hyman

If things are going to go off track, it usually doesn't happen at breakfast or lunch.

It happens at dinner.

It's when you're tired, you're busy, you're reaching for whatever's easiest, which means usually ultra-processed food. But it doesn't have to be that way. In our last video, we showed you how to eat healthy for less than $6 a day. Now I'm going to show you 4 simple, delicious dinners that actually fit into real life. A perfect cod fall-apart short ribs, a nourishing salad, even a burger you can feel good about. It's not about restriction. It's about food you'll actually want to eat. So let's get into it.

As many of you know, I grew up partly in Spain, Barcelona. That's where I was born.

And this is a Spanish dish. It's basically cod in tomato sauce with a little bit of curry powder, onions, ginger, garlic, olive oil, poached fish. Super simple to make, super easy, fast, and yummy. And you can serve it on rice You can serve with veggies, you can make a sweet potato, whatever you want. It's just a delicious dish and it's comforting to me because I kind of grew up with it.

So there's a ginger trick. We chop the onions, we chop the garlic. That's an easy part.

Ginger is kind of hard, but I learned this from David Boulay, who is an amazing chef from New York.

You basically take a teaspoon and you just scrape the skin off and you don't have to lose so much. When you peel it, you lose a lot. And this way you can just get all the brown stuff off. And then you scrape it and it comes right off. There's just little kitchen tricks, little cooking tricks you learn. I didn't learn this till late in life, but it's still a good trick. And then I just dice up the ginger. So once you've chopped all the ginger and all the garlic and all the onions, rest is really easy. Basically, you just take a little olive oil, stick it in the pan. Um, my go-to olive oil. And you throw in onions and you throw in the garlic. And you throw in the ginger and let it all cook down. Mhm. Nice colors, looks beautiful, smells really good too. And then you take a can of tomatoes, and I take diced tomatoes and I pour them in there and You can cook the onions, garlic, and more if you want. You don't have to. A little, again, pepper, salt, and curry powder. You let this cook down for a while. Once the sauce is all cooked down, you take the fish and you just kind of lay it inside on top of the sauce, and then you want to mix it all around after. And, and just poach it for a few minutes. It doesn't take long. You want to make sure it's all covered and the sauce is all in the fish, and then you turn it on really low simmer. Okay, and then you just poach it in maybe 5, 10 minutes. Make sure it doesn't cook too much, 'cause the fish will get mushy. The fish, again, so easy. Little tomato sauce, curry powder, ginger, garlic, onions, and got this beautiful poached cod. And you just get a little rice and you can stick it on your plate. Little half a cup of rice, little more if you want. And it's just delicious. It's my favorite, one of my favorite things to eat. Just like that. I'm not the best food stylist, but you know, you get the picture. I mean, with the little yummy sauce all over it. And this is like a lot of food. So you can eat it with veggies, you can have it with salad, and it's just a great, easy-to-make, go-to, affordable dinner.

My wife and I rewrote, well, she did most of the work actually, "Food Fix," and are now calling it "Food Fix Uncensored" because we really wanted to go deeper on what's happening with the food industry and why we're all sick and overweight and what you can do about it and how you can take back your health from the food industry. And that's what it's all about. So we're gonna make some meals. So we're gonna start with my favorite, which is what my mother taught me to make. It came from Eastern Europe, from the Ukraine.

It's a Russian cabbage short rib borscht.

We used to call it flanken. So if you wanna eat meat, you know, you don't have to buy like a $70 grass-fed ribeye steak. You can have affordable cuts of meat that you can get at your grocery store or big box stores or places like Walmart that really are very affordable. I love short rib.

It's yummy.

It's delicious.

I grew up eating it in the soup.

Whole thing probably takes 10 minutes to prepare. You can make it, put it on the stove, turn to simmer and leave it for hours.

Right. So first thing you just salt and pepper, salt and pepper, salt and pepper. And, you know, for cooking fats, you know, you can do different things, but I like to use butter and just throw a little butter in the pan. And get it to all cook up nice here. We'll throw the meat in and braise it. Kind of seals in the flavor and kind of makes it yummy. And you don't need to do it for very long. So when you braise it, you know, you just cook it for a couple minutes.

You don't have to cook it very long.

And then you put it on a plate and leave it.

The next step is to chop the veggies.

And garlic is a hard one because people don't know how to do garlic, but it's not that hard. You basically just take a big knife and you push down on it, that you can crush it like that. And then you take your knife and you push down on it like this and it crushes it. And what it does is actually makes all the allicin, which is all the medicinal components of the garlic, come out when you squish it. And it's really easy to peel the skin off and you don't have to— it's not a pain in the ass. So that's why I do it. And then I'm gonna give it to my lovely wife to chop. The thing is, when you're cooking, you don't wanna do it yourself. It's a family affair. Get in the family kitchen with your kids. The next step is cutting the onion and I cut the ends off. Like this. You just cut the ends off, and then I cut it in half like that, and then it's easy to peel the skin off if you got the skin that you got to get off. And then you want to wash your fingers, so you want to eat through that, want to do that. And you just chop the onions like this. Yep, it's pretty quick, and you can get fast at it, and eventually it's like anything else, you know, you practice At first it might be slow, and then you build it fast. And you want to put the onions in the pot. Garlic? Garlic, onions, yep. That'll go in there. Want to cook up all the onions, and you can stir it up. I'm going to get the celery in. And it's, again, just super simple chopping. Oof. I'm going to throw all this in the soup. And then, Brie, would you cut the carrots for me? Yes, I will. Here's the carrots. I already pre-peeled them. So the next thing is the cabbage, and you can cut the cabbage in half like this and then shred it, which is kind of like super easy. And again, it doesn't have to take a long time to make a delicious meal that will last you all week. And that's it. You can chop if you can read, if you can cook. My mom always said, if you can read, you can cook. It's all pretty, pretty straightforward. And if you have a little help, it goes a lot faster. And then the next step is basically taking a can of tomatoes. I'm throwing them in. I throw some raisins in there, kind of makes them sweet. They plump up like grapes. I put in the bone broth or beef broth or chicken broth. And the next bit is really simple. You just take all the braised meat, you pour it in, and you just stir it around and you got soup. And then just salt and pepper, basic staples in the kitchen, kind of all you need.

You put maybe a pepper, and then you cover it and you put on the stove for 3 hours and let it simmer and come back and you have this incredible meal.

And the meat falls off the bone and it's just— the raisins plump up, it makes it a little sweet. And it's just so yummy and delicious. I can't wait to eat it because I'm really hungry. And you have this beautiful, yummy, one-pot meal. It's cooked for hours. You know, most people don't know how to cook, and it's the problem. And the food industry tries to tell us it's hard, it's difficult, it's expensive. And the truth is, it's not. Like, you can eat well for less and eat really well. And this is actually how I cook.

You might think you don't get to eat burgers and fries, but you do on the Dr.

Hyman diet, and it's affordable, it's nutritious, and they're not regular fries, they're sweet potato fries, which are actually way more nutritionally dense, 'cause color means medicine. So the more color there is in food, the more medicinal properties it has, the more healthy it is for you. And so we're gonna slice these little sweet potatoes into little fry-like shapes. We just toss them in a bowl with some olive oil, salt, pepper, put them on a baking sheet, stick them in the oven for 20 minutes, and you've got fries. And it's not that hard, super easy, and they taste good. You can even dip in ketchup if you like. A little pepper, a little salt, and then you just kind of mix them up with your hands, get them all nice and coated with all the oil, and then you just throw them on the baking sheet and you spread them out all even. So they all cook evenly. And then we stick them in the oven and we have— in 20 minutes we have fries that even your most picky kids will love.

Next step is making burgers.

And what I like to do is just put all the spices in and then mix it all. Pepper, salt, garlic powder, paprika is another nice spice, garlic powder. Then you can mix it with a fork. Also, it's all mixed in together. We make them into patties. So basically, you take the burger meat, you make it into patties. You can make small or big ones depending on how many people you have. This is the fun part. And you can cook it in, you know, any kind of oil or a little bit of butter. I love cast iron pans. They're so versatile. They really cook things well, evenly. Distribute heat evenly. And kind of flatten them out. They really don't take that long to cook. You can have rare, medium rare, well done, whatever you like. But be careful of the handle on the cast iron pan. Hot pan because it can get hot, so you need a kitchen towel or a mitt. So then when they're cooked for a minute and they get kind of crispy and you think they're a little done, you can flip them. Some people like them crispier or not crispier, but it's up to you.

Okay everybody, this is my version of a healthy, delicious affordable burger and fries, which is basically a burger, a little yogurt, some sweet potato fries.

You can put ketchup on the fries if you want.

I like that.

I like ketchup.

Or if you're from Canada, you can put salt and vinegar on them.

And this is a little hot sauce which you can put on your burger, and you can wrap it in a red cabbage or collard green leaves that are slightly cooked, or kale, or iceberg lettuce, whatever you want.

And kind of wrap it up instead of a bun, which isn't as healthy for you.

So this is my version and it's delicious.

It's super easy to make salad. All you do is the ingredients, put them in a bowl, mix them together with some olive oil and vinegar, salt and pepper. You don't need fancy dressings.

You don't want to buy the store-bought dressings because they're full of chemicals, bad oils, thickeners, gums, and by the way, lots of high fructose corn syrup, which I have no idea why they put in a salad dressing. But anyway, Chopped up. This is just romaine lettuce. Chop it up and throw it in with the tomatoes on top and the chopped carrots. A little bit of onion, a little bit of chopped cucumbers. And then you've got the— I drained these. So this is salmon. This is good quality protein with omega-3 fats. Even farmed salmon has omega-3 fats. It's usually 3 to 1 olive oil to vinegar. I've been doing this so long, I don't really think about it. I just kind of do it. So I just kind of pour the olive oil on. I'm a kind of a more dressing guy. You don't have to be more dressing, some people less dressing. The olive oil, salt and pepper. And really doesn't take a lot to make yummy food. And it's really easy, not expensive, and you can eat real food. And then once you mix all the ingredients together, olive oil, vinegar, you just toss the salad, mix it all up really good with the salmon and the lettuce and Onions and carrots, tomatoes. And here you got this beautiful, simple rainbow-colored salad.

Now I wanna be clear, food access is a real issue. Policy matters, food deserts exist, and none of this is your fault. But you're not powerless. Even one small change can shift your health and your future. So here's the challenge. Eat a whole foods diet for 7 days on about $6 a day. Now, that's the reality that many families are living with, and it's possible to make nourishing choices on that budget. Now, if you plan to do the challenge with me and want a little extra guidance, download my free PDF, A Budget Friendly Guide to Healthy Eating. I created this guide to help you take what you learned in this video and apply it in real life. All the recipes you saw me make here are included in the guide, plus about 30 additional recipes, all for about $6 a day. You also get a sample meal planning template, grocery lists, a batch prep guide, and some must-have kitchen essentials. Now, if you're eating on $6 a day for a week and that feels like too much to do, start smaller. Maybe it's cooking one whole food dinner this week, or swapping out processed foods for real food for a few days. It doesn't matter what you choose. What matters is that you start. Do it with somebody you trust, 'cause getting healthy is a team sport and it's more fun together. Learn together, help each other, support each other. And if you join the challenge, don't forget to tag me in your journey at @drmarkhyman on Instagram and all social media.