Feed Your Family for $12 a Day: A Complete Guide to Nutritious, Delicious Meals for Less Money

by Rhonda Barfield

Provides advice for saving money when shopping for groceries and includes recipes for nutritious, inexpensive foods including turkey-broccoli casserole, banana-cranberry muffins, granola, coleslaw, and apple crisp.

Genres: Nonfiction

210 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2002

Reviews

[Ami]

If you are not a good grocery shopper this book can give you good tips about cutting your budget. If you are a good grocery shopper, there isn't much new here. The prices listed are dated (obviously, it was written almost ten years ago). The techniques are mostly sound (some have passed by the wayside). However, it is the recipes that are the biggest disappointment. The amount of meat allotted per recipe is pitiful. Two ounces of meat for a couple of pizzas? Two cups of turkey for an 8 person casserole? One pound of meat for a lasagna to feed 16 people? It's completely unrealistic. These recipes make it look as if one can only feed a family on $12.00 a day if one makes miserly portions guaranteed to leave the family famished. Unless your grocery skills are very poor, this book is a good one to skip.

(I did give it two stars because there were a couple of bread and granola recipes that looked interesting. That's about all I gleaned from this read.)

[Heather]

Based on the recipes in this book, $12 a day isn't doable in 2011. I was so hoping....

This would be a good book to help you figure out how to meal plan/grocery shop, but if you already have a system going, there isn't much new here. Even though she updated a lot of the recipes from the first edition to make them healthier, they still use a lot of ingredients that are processed. Also, I just can't see some of the recipes feeding my whole family, let alone teenage boys. You'd have to have a whole lot of fillers on the side, and then it's not $12 anymore.

While it's a good idea, it was not useful to me. I didn't find any recipes I'd like to try and the info is too dated (unless you're a total newbie chef).

[Katie Hopkins]

The information is way outdated, even though it was revised in 2002 (that still makes it 11 years old and groceries have skyrocketed since then!) however, it did contain some great tips about buying in bulk and reiterates how cheap it is to just make some things yourself, even if it takes longer.
The boom gives some good healthy recipes and includes nutrition facts under each one. I may try a few of them to have on hand for my simple recipe arsenal, as I would love to get in the habit of making my own baked goods in bulk once a month and then freezing them.

[Diana]

A couple of good recipes but not much my family would eat.