Best Books For Frugal Cooking: Affordable and Wholesome

A large grocery bill can put a lot of strain on families to have a balanced diet filled with gourmet foods! These are our top recommendations for an easy frugal cookbook to keep on hand for wonderful inexpensive meals. Many of these are focus on waste-not recipes and ideas for cooking from scratch that will simplify the way you cook, and lessen your food budget! 

Reflecting back to the days when I first lived alone, I followed all the expert advice: Shop the ads, try new recipes often, and search Pinterest for fun ideas. I thought it worked well and we had a collection of recipes everyone seemed to love. However, the focus was on affordable recipes and not wholesome recipes. I assumed it was impossible to have both! As we began to grow more and more of our own food, we needed to be able to use the things we were raising to make delicious dishes. The cookbooks mentioned below do not necessarily have specific recipes in them, but they will transform the way you prepare food to reduce time and create irresistible recipes from basic ingredients. 

Cookbooks that have transformed my cooking habits

Freeze Fresh

Freeze Fresh is our top book for freezing delicious produce in the summer months! I’d trust the author’s (Crystal from Wholefed Homestead) recipes and ideas without hesitation! Easy to follow instructions with beautiful summer flavors into the winter! There’s a rumor that in 2025 Crystal will have a new book published and we will be first in line to pre-order! Every bit of produce we have frozen according to the recipes in this cookbook provides us with gourmet food at home! The book is set up so that it provides steps to freeze a particular produce followed by the instructions to use it in recipes. 

More with Less Cookbook

More with Less Cookbook there are many versions of this book, and all are wonderful, but this one is the best priced! Ashley was gifted this book when she lived in Niger, and it definitely provided delicious meals with easy ingredients! 

Nourishing Traditions 

Nourishing Traditions this book provides many ideas for different courses, but it also paves the way to transform your diet through education regarding animal fats, soaking grains and proper body function. 

Canning cookbooks

We also pressure can or water bath can many foods to reduce our food budget. You can find all of our favorite canning books here! 

What we eat on the homestead

Curious what we eat each week on the homestead? Here’s how we create meals and here’s how we use raw milk from our dairy cow each week.