“EatingWell on a Budget”
By Jessie Price and the EatingWell Test Kitchen
Countryman Press, $18.95
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What it is: Tips, tricks and recipes from EatingWell Magazine, all trimmed to help save your food budget. The chefs and editors at the magazine, who pride themselves on providing healthy options for the stay-at-home chef, welcomed a new challenge: cooking on a budget. They crunched the numbers and found that a typical week of preparing EatingWell dinners for four would cost $109.93. With “Eating Well on a Budget” recipes, a week cost $57.58. By substituting recipes such as cod with tomato cream sauce with one for sweet and sour chicken drumsticks, households can trim the budget without adding more fat.
Praise and quibbles: Unfortunately, the 140 recipes in the book don’t come with a price tag, so the home cook is left doing the math. But the front of the book offers 40 tips to cut costs. From replacing meat with beans to planning your weekly shopping list, the tips are designed to create an organized, no-nonsense cook — sort of accountant-meets-master-of-the-kitchen. Useful guides throughout the book include such topics as building a better salad and vegetable roasting.
Why you’ll like it: The wide range of tested recipes — everything from sandwiches to goulash to tofu — meets the dietary needs and cravings of even the pickiest households.
— Julia Edwards, Tribune Newspapers