Do you think feeding your family well and staying on budget is even possible?  Are you having a hard time coming up with ideas for dinners for your family? Well, I have found the cure for you, The $5 Dinner Mom Cookbook.

Creation of $5 Dinner Mom

The $5 Dinner Mom is Erin Chase.  I have enjoyed reading her blog since its inception.  The blog started when the country was going through a recession and the cost of food was at an all time high.  My family was no different and we were also having problems finding enough money to buy food.  I started reading Erin’s blog and found a wealth of information.  Erin, like many other bloggers today, started putting her ideas down and wrote a cookbook known as The $5 Dinner Mom.

Inside The $5 Dinner Mom Cookbook

The $5 Dinner Mom has 200 recipes for quick, easy, healthy and budget friendly meal ideas that cost less than $5 a meal. The cookbook starts out with three whole chapters on Strategic Grocery Shopping, Strategic Couponing, and Strategic Meal Planning. Erin packs in all the information and tips that she has learned in her own experience of trying to feed her family healthy, budget friendly meals.  I really enjoyed these chapters.  It was like talking with a good friend who was sharing tips.  The rest of the cookbook is broken down into several chapters of recipes for different food categories including; Pasta and Pizza, Chicken and Turkey, Beef, Pork, Soups and Stews, and Vegetarian.  The last chapter is devoted to homemade recipes like dressings, sauces and breads.   Many of these recipes are used in other recipes found in the cookbook.  The recipes all contain price breakdowns by ingredients, which is very helpful for planning your own recipes.  At the end of each recipe is a frugal fact that will help you and your family save money in the grocery store as well as time saving meal preparation tips. The really neat thing about the recipes is that they are an entire meal in one recipe and again all are $5 or less.

Testing $5 Dinner Mom Cookbook Recipes

I decided to review this cookbook so I really needed to test some of the recipes.  The first recipe we tried was the Potato Pizza Pie on page 248.  I think that the main reason I decided to try this recipe was because the picture in the book looked so yummy.  I never really realized it was a recipe from the vegetarian chapter.  This recipe was really interesting because it showed a different way to use potatoes.  I had a lot on-hand that needed to be used so it made it a perfect choice for me.   This recipe also uses the homemade pizza sauce found in the homemade chapter.  Making your own sauces can really save you some money!   According to the recipe, the total cost was $4.34.  I had everything on-hand except the carrots, so this meal was pretty inexpensive to make.  The Pizza Pie tasted a lot like pizza and was liked by the whole family. I also liked that her bread recipes included bread machine instructions.

$5 Dinner Mom Blog

You should check out Erin’s blog($5 Dinners), it is full of information on how to save money on healthy family meals, and she has lots of recipes.  Most of the recipes in the cookbook are not listed on her blog so you need to buy the cookbook to get those recipes.

 How Can I Get $5 Dinner Mom Cookbook?

 I received a cookbook to review, but was not compensated for writing a review of the book by the author or publisher.  If you are interested in buying a cookbook for yourself, you can find it on Amazon for $10.19, at the time of this writing.  I have found the cookbook very helpful for my family and I hope each of you get the chance to check it out to help your family eat healthy, easy, budget friendly dinners.