Budget Friendly Recipe Sources for Frugal Families

Budget friendly recipe sources have actually become way easier to find these days. More bloggers are writing about the food they make. Major food product manufacturers creating destinations for consumers. Print publications are taking their goodies and sharing on websites. As a result, you have plenty of resources, but I sometimes find I almost have too many choices! It can be overwhelming. Add cookbooks and cooking magazines in to the mix and you’ll have recipes coming at you from everywhere.

The family-friendly budget category is its own thing and within this area it can sometimes be hard to easily find what I need from general cookbooks and “foodie” sites. The simple recipe for mac and cheese may be easy to make but if it requires five kinds of exotic cheese that’s not an everyday meal in our house.

So whether online, in print, or on the back of a can, there’s a recipe out there for you, especially if you target recipe collections aimed at frugal meals. Here are some of my favorite resources for creating family meals on a budget. Today we’ll focus on web sites. The next installment of this series will be on cookbooks.

Online Budget Recipe Resources

5 Dollar Dinners
Erin, the publisher of 5 Dollar Dinners, blogs about her recipes, all costing under $5 to feed around 4 people. That’s not easy to do! Her site is fun to read and the ideas are easy but appealing. She has a fresher take on budget cooking than a lot of established publications. She also has a brand new cookbook available here.

Fab Frugal Foodie
I recently stumbled upon this site and I like what I see – budget-friendly meal ideas that appeal to those who really like to cook. Check it out!

Once A Month Mom
If you want to learn about making several meals at once and then freezing them for later use, Once a Month Mom is your girl. There are excellent educational resources here as well as recipes.

A Year of Slow Cooking
This isn’t specifically a budget cooking site but slow cooking meshes well with the idea – you can take beans and cheaper cuts of meat and make magic, baby. She has a new book as well, take a look here.

Kraft Food and Family
There are many manufacturer web sites that offer recipes but Kraft’s database is large yet well organized. I linked to the new “Budget Wise” feature. Check the Canadian site too for even more ideas. Also note that we are huge fans of Kraft Mac and Cheese and love to make recipes that incorporate it. The generic kind just isn’t the same. Kraft works some sort of delicious cheese voodoo.

Betty Crocker
Aside from my fantasy of being the image of Betty Crocker (the together housewife instead of my reality of dirty yoga pants smeared with jelly and kid muck) I give kudos to BC for having a really rich repository of information. Plus Betty is a modern gal these days and I think you’ll find the recipes really deliver on being fresh, family friendly, yet simple to prepare.

I snubbed sources like Betty and Kraft in my early days, thinking that if I didn’t make everything purely by hand I wasn’t a good cook. Cheater ingredients are okay. In fact, they often save the day, and Gordon Ramsey can still be my pretend boyfriend. Betty Crocker makes lots of products that are good for you too. The result is a wide range of recipes for everyone from foodies to noobies.

Eat Better America
This is General Mills’ site. Simple meals that are also fresh, healthy, and well rounded are my faves. Eat Better America “gets it”.

Allrecipes
Allrecipes is enormous, and many of their recipes are user-created and fairly simple to make. They do have a budget feature, which I linked to. I use the recipe box to save them for later. There are so many recipes that I’d never find them again without it!

Online Versions of Magazines
Almost every print magazine now has a corresponding web site where you can find even more resources. A few mags that regularly feature budget recipes come to mind:

• All You online. This magazine has a heavy focus on frugal living and the recipes really deliver on this note. The Snickerdoodle Pie uses up my leftover buttermilk and has become one of my favorite pie recipes ever.
• Woman’s Day online. I get emails from them almost every day from signing up for their newsletters. Nearly half of them are for budget recipe features. They do a good job of testing recipes to make sure they taste good too. The Month of Menus feature also rocks.
• Real Simple. Their recipes really are simple. A few recipes don’t qualify for the budget meal category but many more do fit the bill. I find everything from “kid meals” to quick solutions for entertaining. They have a really modern, fresh feel that I love.

There are way more out there I’m sure but those are some of the sites that I consistently use. What are your go-to resources? Leave a comment and share please!

Fine Print: I was in no way compensated to share my opinion on any of the above web sites!