Taste of Home: Dinner on a Dime: 403 Budget-Friendly Family Recipes

This book is ideal for people who want quick, healthy and affordable meals! Highly reommend....!

I love Taste of Home Dinner on a Dime Cookbook. My daughter bought this cookbook and absolutely loves it. She has made several of the recipes. The recipes are easy to make and taste delicious. I would definitely recommend this cookbook to everyone who likes to cook. I even bought one for my daughter-in-law since she would look at it everytime she came to my house.

You cannot go wrong with anything from Taste of Home. I am a huge fan since the ingredients are easy to find, the food is easy to cook, and it always tastes amazing!

I own many cookbooks from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone to Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition - 2006. While these are still my favorite cookbooks, most nights you just don't have unlimited money and several hours to make dinner. I bought Dinner on a Dime for quick, cheap, but still homemade meals for those rush nights as a better alternative to fast food. Look & Feel: This book has a glossy cover and pages with at least one picture on each page. It is 255 pages long. Probably the thing I dislike about it most is the binding; it is difficult to get this book to sit open. But, for the price of the book the bright pictures and nice pages makes you feel that you have gotten your money's worth. Index: This book has two indexes. The first is an Alphabetical Index, the one you expect in a cookbook. The second, which is an interesting concept, is a General Index which "lists every recipe by food category, major ingredient and/or cooking method" (251). Introduction: This book has several "introduction pages" starting with Dinner on a Dime. Dinner on a Dime: This two page layout gives you "thrifty grocery shopping tips" (4). Some are obvious such as "buy generic" (5) and "use coupons" (5), but others are very thoughtful including "when a sale is not a sale" (4). These two pages include a total of 21 tips to saving money while grocery shopping. The next intro page is Grocery Shopping Guidelines--Aisle by Aisle. It splits the store up into 6 categories, produce, meats & seafood, canned goods, frozen foods, breads cereals & pasta, and dairy, with tips on how to save money in each section. Most of these tips will be familiar to those who try to shop on a budget regularly such as "buy generic brands and stock up when on sale" (6). The third intro page is Cost Effective Pantry. This is actually a very useful 8-step guide to cleaning out, organizing, and understanding what is already stocked in your pantry. They make the point that if you don't already know what is in your pantry you may buy duplicates or allow things to go bad. The last introduction page (and the most useful, in my opinion) is the Stocking Up and Storage Guidelines. On these three pages they give general information about pantry, refrigerator, and frozen foods storage. Along with this they also include a 2 1/2 page chart with regularly-used food items and how long they will last in the pantry, in the fridge, and in the freezer. Organization: I really like the organization of this book. It is not filed into your typical organization ... The categories are: Breakfast & Brunch, Beef, Pork, Poultry, Fish & Meatless, Planned Overs, Freezer Pleasers, Side Dishes, Soups & Salads, Breads, Desserts. Breakfast & Brunch: This section was surprising in a "Dinner Cookbook" but then again Breakfast for Dinner can be fun. It includes 20 recipes such as Vegetable Ham Quiche, Sausage Pancakes, French Toast Fingers, and Old-Fashioned Doughnuts. Beef: This section includes 45 rec