The grocery line of a household budget is one of the simplest areas to blow past your limits. Can you really be blamed? We all enjoy eating — savory dishes, sweet treats — and resisting them isn’t always easy.
But careless purchases of ingredients — even for meals made at home — can quickly become a strain on your finances. One of the most dependable tactics for reining in food spending is sticking to recipes or a meal plan.
Below are six cookbooks offering nutritious, wallet-friendly recipes that can be scaled to feed just one person or an entire household.
1. Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4/Day
Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4/Day by Leanne Brown aims to rewrite the story of affordable, healthy eating by delivering a wide array of recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert — and by ensuring families who can’t afford the physical book can still access the recipes.
With dishes like banana pancakes, homemade calzones, and peach coffee cake typically costing less than $2.75 per serving, both your hunger and your budget will be happier. Each recipe highlights the macronutrients — carbohydrates, healthy fats, protein — needed for a balanced diet. Many recipes can also be doubled to serve a family or frozen for later use.
The entire cookbook is available for free on the author’s website and has been downloaded more than a million times. Additionally, for every copy purchased, another is donated to a family in need.
2. Budget Bytes: Over 100 Easy, Delicious Recipes to Slash Your Grocery Bill in Half
If you identify as a thrifty food lover, you’ve probably come across Budget Bytes during your searches. Beth Moncel, who founded Budget Bytes, holds a bachelor’s in nutritional science and began refining budget-friendly cooking over a decade ago as a cash-strapped young adult.
As one of the top blogs for eating well on a budget, it was inevitable Budget Bytes would collect its recipes into a cookbook: Budget Bytes: Over 100 Easy, Delicious Recipes to Slash Your Grocery Bill in Half.
From Greek steak tacos to teriyaki salmon with sriracha mayo, this collection promises to satisfy both meat-eaters and plant-forward cooks while preserving your finances.
3. Tasty Ultimate: How to Cook Basically Anything
Tasty began as a BuzzFeed segment showing playful, fast-paced cooking clips. It has grown into its own culinary brand.
With hundreds of recipes shared across social platforms, the Tasty team distilled essential techniques into Tasty Ultimate: How to Cook Basically Anything.
Although this book isn’t strictly about budget cooking, mastering core skills — poaching, frying, chopping, grilling — is essential if you want to cut down waste and stretch ingredients further in the kitchen.
4. College Cookbook: Healthy, Budget-Friendly Recipes for Every Student
Being a college student is financially challenging enough without a bulky grocery bill piling on stress. Tiffany Shelton’s College Cookbook: Healthy, Budget-Friendly Recipes for Every Student gives young adults the tools to manage both money and nutrition through sensible cooking.
Featuring comfort staples like quick mac ’n’ cheese alongside more nutritious options such as homemade spaghetti and meatballs, the College Cookbook offers variety to keep meals interesting and simple enough to prepare after a long day of classes.
The book also provides practical tips on budgeting, storing leftovers, and leveraging common student appliances — microwave, slow cooker, toaster oven — to create wholesome, craveable meals.
5. Frugal Vegan
Veganism is sometimes seen as out of reach or costly because of the specialty ingredients in some plant-based recipes. Frugal Vegan, by Katie Koteen and Kate Kasbee, challenges those myths. The cookbook is packed with vegan dishes that are both nutritious and budget-wise.
Beer-battered avocado tacos and black bean tacos headline the mouthwatering list, while other options like crunchy Thai salad and mini key lime pies are equally tempting.
Frugal Vegan also walks readers through savvy grocery-shopping strategies, batch-cooking and freezing methods, and ways to afford organic items on a tight budget.
6. Good Cheap Eats
Another blog-turned-book success, Good Cheap Eats zeroes in on nutritious recipes and quality ingredients that won’t break the bank.
Jessica Fisher, who created the Good Cheap Eats blog and wrote the cookbook, admits she once wasted both money and groceries. She now offers economical recipes, meal-planning worksheets, and time-management tools to help keep more money in your pocket.
The Good Cheap Eats cookbook includes tempting recipes such as garlic-herb soft pretzels, tortellini chickpea pasta salad, poblano chile enchiladas, and plenty more.
This piece was written by Dana Ortiz, a contributor to Savinly.
