Family Feasts for $75 a Week: A Penny-Wise Mom Shares Her Recipe for Cutting Hundreds from Your Monthly Food Bill by Mary Ostyn

This book will change your life, and your budget!by GreenThumbMamaBeth

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September 03, 2009: My first step in learning to be more frugal with our grocery spending was learning to bake more from scratch, have a garden, and preserve the produce. My second step was getting Mary's newest book "Family Feasts for $75 a Week".

It's not just a recipe book, although there are lots of yummy recipes. It's a guide to shopping and living more frugally. In this book, Mary goes into great detail how she shops, how she keeps track of prices, and how she meal plans. She includes hints and tips to keep costs down from eliminating or cutting down on convenience foods, to trying new things from scratch. I have to say, I thought I was doing ok in this department, but now that I've been applying her techniques for meal planning, looking for deals, keeping track of prices in a price book and just generally taking the time to shop around, our food budget has changed dramatically.

Using Mary's Two Times Five meal planner (pg 64) to plan meals for 2 weeks, armed with sale pages, the new knowledge I gained from her on what good prices for meat and other groceries are and how to check prices per unit, I headed out to 2 grocery stores yesterday with my kids. I took her approach to having my kids in the store with me - making them seek out the best deals right along with me. I taught my kids how to look at the price tags for price per unit and it became a treasure hunt for who could find the best deals on what we sought to buy! I had my calculator with me and we recorded every food item. I was on a budget; determined to stay within it!

At one store, as per their sale flyer, I got lean ground beef for $1.68 a pound! I bought enough for the next month. They were also selling chicken thighs and legs for $.79 a pound and I bought one of each for the crockpot for chicken tacos. I should be able to get 2 meals from those chicken packages. I also found cheddar cheese for $4.99 for 2 pounds. They also had a coupon for the sandwich meats we like, buy one get one free. At that store, I bought chicken, cheese, ground beef, onions ($.49/lb)and sandwich meat for the month for a total of $47.63.

At the next store, we bought all the rest of our groceries. We stayed closely to our list. We bought 2 items not on the list because I had forgotten to write them down. There were sales all over the place and we got 2 weeks worth of groceries for breakfast, lunches and dinners for $99.89!

Total for 2 weeks? $147.52. The only thing one of the stores was out of was the breakfast sausage we like. So I'll have to make a trip to get that later this week. Considering the fact that I bought enough meat to last the month, I think I'm way under budget for the month even! There is NO WAY I could have done this without help. We did not have to cut out anything we needed! The fact that we were practically under budget was a miracle.

Struggling to be frugal? Don't have the first clue how to shop for deals? Clueless about how to organize and store the food you buy? Needing some new, low cost meal ideas? Here's my advice:

1. Get Mary's book. It will change your life.

2. Put forth the effort to meal plan and stick to it.

3. Set a goal and attempt to meet it.

4. Take her $75 a week challenge!!

I guarantee, you will not be sorry!

A Must-Have for Anyone Looking to Feast and Save at the Same Timeby MerlotMudpies

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July 10, 2009: This month I cut my grocery bill by a full 50%, and my husband complimented me on how well we've been eating recently at the same time. So much of it has to do with reading Family Feasts for $75 a Week.

Let me just mention a couple of things I love about this book:

1. Delicious Recipes Suited to Any Skill Level: While Mary DOES mention tater tots once in her book it is only to tell you how much better homemade fries are, not to teach you about tater-tot casserole with cheese whiz topping (sorry if you love that stuff). Not only that, but she upgrades her oven fries with her own homemade Ethiopian seasoning mix (and provides several other easy suggestions for seasonings if a mouth on fire is not your particular version of tasty). Her recipes are seriously good, seriously easy and seriously cost effective.

In particular I must recommend her Thai chicken curry dish for which you can make your own curry paste and even your own coconut milk if you don't have a can on hand but do have some shaved coconut in the freezer. Another favorite already is her suggested recipe for making your own granola cereal. (As I stood at the counter breaking up my first batch, chest swelled with pride, my husband gave me a smooch and seriously appreciative squeeze and raved about how amazing it was that I could make something like that all on my own. Sorry, Mary, I took that compliment for my own and didn't re-mention the fact that I'd learned it from the book.)

2. Flexible Ideas on Cost Cutting that Allow You to Create Your Own Plan: One of the frustrating things about many books like these is that, in order for the system to work, you have to change a million things all at once and after about two weeks (for the very strong and enduring, perhaps three), the whole thing goes out the window because it's just too hard to maintain so much change all at once. Mary, however, is very clear about her desire for readers not to make this mistake. Instead you're given four areas in which you can assess your strengths and weaknesses and then a ton of ideas to choose from in each of those areas to begin the process. This book's plan is laid out like an a la carte menu of great ideas that you can tailor fit to your needs and your money-saving goals.

I hate to admit it but I'm the queen of starting strong, getting over my head, and fizzling out completely on things. This is something I dislike about myself and have been working hard to overcome. But ladies, this process has been seriously painless so far and the benefits have far outweighed the effort. Oh and another thing? You don't have to use coupons! (But you can if you need to do penance or something.)

3. An Easy and Interesting Read that Gets Right Down to the Issues and Lets You Start Saving Almost Immediately: I got this book on a Sunday. Inspired, I refused to go to the grocery store until Wednesday because I could see in my own kitchen several different great meals I could already make with things I had in the house. During that time I was able to use small portions of my time each day to figure out what changes I could make, lay out my plan, and embark. Holding on to just a few of the ideas I'd found in the book I set out my first week and was delighted with every grocery receipt I collected because I knew I was making wiser decisions already.

I could not recommend Family Feasts for $75 a Week more highly.