Many Americans are on weight-loss diets.  Some do well all on their own, while others use diet pills or programs to give them a little “boost.”  Consider books like Family Feasts for $75 a Week as hydroxycut for your budget.  Sure, you can cut the “flab” from your grocery budget on your own, but outside help can’t hurt. 🙂

I was blessed to win Mary Ostyn’s book a while back and, while I read it right away, I’m just now getting around to telling you about it.  (Sorry!)  Mary blogs at Owlhaven and, since she has ten children, I figured that her approach to saving money on groceries must also take time constraints into consideration!

The first few sections of the book discusses principles of saving on groceries.  Although none of this was really new information for me, it was a good refresher course, and would be excellent information for anyone starting out.  Mary’s style is very practical and realistic.  There is a sense of balance here that is sometimes missing from money-saving materials.  For instance, she mentions that they keep a stash of paper napkins in the pantry, but use the cloth napkins when they’re clean.  Instead of an all-or-nothing approach, this is a real-life way of doing things.  Baby steps are suggested, to do things like developing a price book without being overwhelmed.

After these introductory chapters, the recipes begin.  Although the collection draws somewhat heavily on ethnic recipes, there are not a lot of “weird” recipes here.  Most of them are fairly simple, healthy recipes using real ingredients.  They are all relatively quick, too.  Not all are super-speed recipes, but almost all of them are ready in under an hour (unless they are cook-all-day-in-the-crockpot types of recipes).  So all of these are very realistic to prepare.  Recipes are even provided for a lot of “make your own” items, like baking mix and pancake syrup.  And don’t worry; the recipes don’t all serve twelve!  Most of the meal recipes serve the standard 4-6, so you can multiply them – or not – as needed.

I think this would be a fantastic gift for a new homemaker.  Nearly all of us can probably glean something from it.  I am looking forward to trying some of these new recipes (now that I have written this up and can carry the book away from my computer!).