$5 Dinner Mom Cookbook: A Cheap Recipe Cookbook Review

What: The $5 Dinner Mom Cookbook, by Erin Chase, on sale for $14.99 ($10.19 if you buy from Amazon.). Erin’s the founder of 5 Dollar Dinners, a cheap recipes site that’s gained popularity by creating dinners, well, for no more than $5.

Why:

• The recipes are easy to cook, straightforward, and use healthy ingredients. If I can figure it out, you can figure it out!
• Recipes show the cost of a meal, which serves a family of four (or makes for tasty leftovers for those of you with less mouths to feed).
• Each recipe also comes with a Frugal Fact to help you stretch your food savings and eliminate waste whenever possible.

The only area of improvement I’d suggest is to have more recipe photos throughout the book. However, many of the recipes are old favorites (like the Easy Chicken Potpie), so you should have a good idea of what it’s supposed to look like.

Tested Recipe: I got a chance to use some leftover turkey meat that I’d frozen from the holidays. I’ll probably make another batch of this using some leftover pork tenderloin! The white sauce recipe was simple, and making this from scratch (ok, so there are some frozen vegetables) makes everything just taste so much better.

Easy Turkey Potpie (using the Easy Chicken Potpie recipe on page 100 of The $5 Dinner Mom Cookbook)
3 c Homemade Cream of Chicken White sauce (see recipe below)
2 diced chicken breasts or 2 c leftover shredded cooked chicken (in my case, leftover cooked turkey)
1/2 onion, chopped
2 potatoes, peeled and diced
1 1/2 c frozen peas and carrots
1/2 t dried thyme
1/4 c butter
3/4 c white flour
1 1/2 t baking powder
1 c milk
2 heads broccoli (optional as a side dish…I skipped this!)

Prepare the homemade “cream of chicken” white sauce.

Combine sauce, raw diced chicken or shredded leftover chicken (or the turkey), chopped onions, diced potatoes, and frozen peas and carrots in a 10-inch deep glass pie dish. Mix well.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a small mixing bowl, melt the butter. Stir in flour, baking powder, and milk. Whisk until it forms a thin batter. Pour the batter over the chicken and sauce in the pie dish; the batter will thicken as it bakes.

Bake the potpie for 45-55 minutes, or until the chicken pieces have cooked through and the sauce is bubbly.

Homemade Basic White Sauce Recipe (from The $5 Dinner Mom Cookbook)
4 T butter
6 T flour
3 c milk
salt and pepper

In a medium saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the flour and whisk with the melted butter until it forms a paste and bubbles.

Whisk in the milk (or other liquids). Whisk until the flour and butter have dissolved into the milk.

Cook the sauce over medium heat for 5-6 minutes, stirring continuously. The sauce will begin to thicken, as it bubble and cooks. (To reach the desired consistency of the sauce, add more milk or flour, 1 T at a time, as needed.)

Variations:
Cream of Chicken: Use 2 c of milk and 1 c of chicken broth in place of the 3 c of milk.

Voila! That’s it!

Final thoughts:

• I didn’t read where to put the thyme. I ended up sprinkling it into the sauce and vegetables filling.
• For the topping, I’d probably whisk in the flour last, after adding the milk and baking powder, as it did form some dough lumps that I had to crush with the whisk. However, these lumps admittedly weren’t an issue once the pie was cooked.