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:
Cooking on a Boot Strap
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 all vegan now, but that makes it interesting and very cheap.
Frugal Queen
Jane at Frugal Queen is a legend. She is a huge inspiration to me and one of the reasons I began my blog. I enjoy her no nonsense approach to food and everything else. You won’t find any fancy recipes, just decent, cheap home cooking. As she eats gluten free, everything can be adapted for those with a sensitivity or Coeliac’s disease.
Diary of a Frugal Family
Cass at Diary of a Frugal Family is a recent find. 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.
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.
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!
The Skint Foodie
I love the Skint Foodie blog. It has some seriously sexy recipes for a small budget! This is extremely well written by someone who has struggled with alcohol, homelessness and unemployment. He wanted to prove that eating well wasn’t the preserve of the wealthy, that planning and imagination meant he could still eat fabulous food with very little money. It is witty, informative and eye opening.
Frugal Food
Faye’s blog, Frugal Food, does what it says on the tin. She focusses on producing frugal meals with quality ingredients. Being frugal doesn’t have to mean being cheap! Some recipes are quite adventurous, but sound delicious, such as Toro Rosso pie, made with minced beef and Hungarian sausage hot pot.
Which frugal food blogs inspire you? I hope you enjoy my suggestions and have a frugal foodie weekend.
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.
Same
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.
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/ )
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!
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.
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.
Yes, I agree with all the above. I love the Jamie one, which I found in the charity shop
Thank you for listing those blogs. I will be checking them out!