I love food and experimenting with recipes and, just because I am on a budget, I don’t want to eat badly. Glossy cookbooks and food programmes are all very well, but sometimes require fancy ingredients that are expensive. This is why when I want inspiration I go to my favourite frugal food blogs. (Incidentally, some of my own frugal recipes are to be found here.)
Here are some of the best frugal food blogs, in no particular order.
Best Frugal Food Blogs
Cooking on a Bootstrap
Master of the budget recipe is Jack Monroe. It started with A Girl Called Jack, but you will now find the blog at Cooking on a Bootstrap. What I like about Jack is the recipe descriptions – there is often a story behind a particular creation – and the way the cost of each recipe is so carefully calculated. The cooking here is mostly vegan now, but that makes it interesting and very cheap.
Jack has written a number of cookbooks now, but my favourite is still her first, A Girl Called Jack: 100 delicious budget recipes
She also has a new one reflecting her interest in vegan food, Vegan (ish): 100 simple, budget recipes that don’t cost the earth
Reduced Grub
Kelly at Reduced Grub is well worth a visit. She has loads of recipes on her blog. They aren’t as cheap as some of the other blogs I have mentioned, but still good family food on a budget. She has recently appeared on Channel 5’s Shop Smart Save Money.
Diary of a Frugal Family
Cass at Diary of a Frugal Family was the winner of the first ever 2019 SHOMOS legendary money blogger award. She emphasises the importance of meal planning, which is my mantra too for those attempting to stick to a budget. This is good, family food and includes plenty of delicious home baking.
Thrifty Lesley
Thrifty Lesley shows you how to feed yourself for £1 a day. The recipes are interesting and healthy too. Lesley uses very little meat, which is how her food is so cheap I think.
This is a clever and well organised blog. She has written menu plans to help you stick to the £1 a day budget, whatever your circumstances. There is even a no power meal plan, aimed at people who have no power in their accommodation. This is serious stuff and really useful.
Utterly Scrummy Food for Families
A brand new blog to me is Utterly Scrummy Food for Families, which has an emphasis on budgeting and meal planning. Michelle presents plenty of inspiration and advice on using leftovers, reducing your food bills and producing delicious meals on a budget. I particularly fancy this potato and vegetable bake. My kind of frugal food blog!
Eat Not Spend
Jane from Eat Not Spend is the author of Home Economics: How to eat like a king on a budget
The vegan chocolate cake looks good, which uses avocado to create a creamy topping.
Skint Chef
Skint Chef is the brain child of Ricky and Naomi from Skint Dad, supported by a professional caterer. It is a relatively new blog but contains lots of delicious looking budget food for families. I love the sound of the easy keema rice!
As it is a relatively new blog, I am looking forward to seeing how this site develops.
Good Cheap Eats
This is a US blog and worthy of a place on my frugal food blogs list.
Sometimes things get lost in translation when I am looking at US recipes, as they use ingredients and terms that I’m not familiar with. However, Good Cheap Eats is very clear, straightforward and easy to follow.
It is also really well organised, with lots of emphasis on meal planning and ideas for saving money on groceries. I loved this post, Feeding Teenagers without Going Broke, as I remember well when it seemed my three were permanently hungry. They were like a plague of locusts when they got in from school!
The blog’s author, Jessica Fisher, has published a book based on the blog, Good Cheap Eats Dinner in 30 Minutes or Less: Fresh, Fast, and Flavorful Home-Cooked Meals, with More Than 200 Recipes
Which frugal food blogs inspire you? I hope you enjoy my suggestions, but feel free to add yours in the comments below.
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Eloise (thisissixty.blog) says
There are a few recommendations that I’ve not heard of here, Jane, so I will be taking a look. I love Jack Monroe’s book and use it a lot. But I also take lots of recipes and adapt them, improvising on ingredients that are sometimes quite ridiculously expensive.
shoestringjane@outlook.com says
Same
Minimalist45 says
I tend to look up cooking blogs and then favourite all the pages with slow cooker sections. I’ve found some crackers. If the recipes have gazillion ingredients I don’t t bother. I also screen shot the recipes to keep in my photos. It’s fun. Love your list here, thank you.
Faith A. says
Oooh great to have some new recommendations, I’d never come across Faye’s Frugal Food blog before. I try not to buy cookery books either, although I’m most excited about Jack Monroe’s new book coming out. If I need specific recipes, I often search for BBC recipes as pretty reliable, and then pick ones with frugal ingredients. But I love reading food blogs for the inspiration. Really enjoy Miss South’s writing, with a lot of slow cooker info (http://www.miss-south.com/ ) and also the £1 a day food challenges on Eat Not Spend (https://eatnotspend.wordpress.com/ )
shoestringjane@outlook.com says
Thanks, Faith. I will take a look at those. I will believe Jack’s book is actually going to be published when I see it. Been waiting a year and a half!
Margaret Powling says
Having been brought up in the frugal-by-necessity years of the 1950s (I can remember ration books, a’hem! Dearie me, that dates me!!!) I learned at my mother’s knee, so to speak, how to make inexpensive meals, ‘stretching’ meat for the whole family. Today I similarly ‘stretch’ a roast chicken, so that it can make several meals for us in the usual way: roast, then as curries, and finally soup from the stock of the carcass. We like fairly simple meals, here, too, with no ‘fancy, expensive’ ingredients. We must bear in mind that when recipes appear in the papers or magazines, or in the magazines of the supermarkets, they are there mainly for a reason: to promote the various mentioned ingredients which can be bought within the store. If there’s an expensive ingredient in a recipe, I just don’t bother with the recipe, simple as that.
Gillian says
I’m another Jack Monroe fan – loved the first book so much that I actually bought a copy on ebay after wearing-out the library copy. I got her 2nd book out of the library too, but not so keen on it so did not purchase. Have just finished 3 weeks of library loan for Jamie Oliver’s ‘Save with Jamie’ recipes which had some clever ideas for using leftovers and batch cooking.
shoestringjane@outlook.com says
Yes, I agree with all the above. I love the Jamie one, which I found in the charity shop
Debbie G says
Thank you for listing those blogs. I will be checking them out!
Jessica Fisher says
Thanks so much for including me. As a huge fan of all things UK, I’m honored to be the American on your list!