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| 5 Meals for $5 - How to Feed 5 People 5 Meals for $5.00 - $8.00 or Less! You Don't Need to Be Wealthy To Eat Healthy | 
 enlarge | Authors: The Queen Of More Green, Jaci Rae
Creator: Albert Garcia
Publisher: North Shore Records, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $18.95
Buy New: $16.41
You Save: $2.54 (13%)
New (4) Used (4) from $16.41
Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 147469
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Pages: 182
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.6
ISBN: 0974622990
EAN: 9780974622996
ASIN: 0974622990
Publication Date: May 12, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new, unread. IN STOCK. FREE UPGRADE TO PRIORITY MAIL. SHIPS WITHIN 48 HOURS. No remainder mark. Shipped promptly in a box with USPS delivery confirmation. A Great Gift !
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| Customer Reviews:
 Must have book June 16, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Great book! Delicious and easily made. What I like the most thought is the money saving information because currently it so necessary. The debt plan is great too. Highly recommend this book.
Excellent food and menu planning June 16, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book has excellent food. Fresh and tasty is what we describe it. Loved the fact that the food is easy and mostly quick to make even thought it's all fresh except the handful of helping hands meals, which you make but with help. The shopping is made easy with a shopping guide and stores around the US. Her site has a much more extensive listing though I just checked it out. This is a must have book and the title tells it all. You don't have to be wealthy as the author has proven in order to eat healthy and eating healthy is what my family is about.
Great Book Truth Be Told June 16, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
This is a great book! The recipes are easy to prepare and I love the fact that Jaci Rae put with many of the main dishes the price of salad and the dressing (all made by yourself, which is really cool) with the meals.
The meals that my family and I have tried thus far are fresh and delicious. There are nearly 300 recipes (I am very detail) and there are many chapters in addition to the recipes that are teaching my family and I how to save money and get out of debt.
My husband I really love the chapter on free date nights and fun things to do. It is the best cookbook I have ever owned. The truth be told, there are approximately 40 recipes that include rice, potatoes and pasta, but I love rice and pasta. But Jaci recommends brown rice, not white as the reviewer Kerry suggested. Actually, Jaci gives you a choice.
But there are no recipes that require salt, although most recipes have it in the recipe ingredients that you add to the meal just like the one listed on this page. But if you cannot take salt, do not like it or just cannot have it, omit the salt. Easy as that.
Even for the Chicken Divan, which is a favorite of my family I have always had to use canned cream of mushroom soup and canned cream of celery soup. It never occurred to me to make fresh. But Jaci Rae includes those recipes on making all the cream soups yourself from scratch.
The meals really do feed my entire family regular portions, a few of the meals like the Chicken Divan are very large and actually, we have many leftovers with that meal. But I love the balance Jaci put into the meals as well.
I also love the weights and measures chart and the conversion chart. My mom does as well. She found a chart in there she has never been able to find.
The truth be told. This is an incredibly well rounded and great book!
 A handy resource as things go from bad to worse June 16, 2008
14 out of 20 found this review helpful
We're sliding into what James Howard Kunstler calls the "long emergency." Escalating fuel costs (a year from now, we'll look back longingly at $4 per gallon) will progressively drive up the cost of food, both because most of our food is transported and because the mass production and processing of it involves huge fossil fuel investments. We're already feeling the increase when we go marketing, and it's only going to get worse.
That's why books like Jaci Rae's 5 Meals for $5 are going to become increasingly valuable. Rae offers more than cost-cutting recipes. Just as importantly, she provides tips on how to go about budgeting, what kinds of foods preserve well, bulk buying, and cooking with a minimum amount of waste. The meals are all simple to prepare, and there's some variety--although vegetarians will find themselves under-represented here (on the other hand, vegetarians are used to being under-represented).
Although I generally like what Rae has done here as well as the spirit in which it's offered, there are a couple of features to her book that I find a bit troublesome. The first is that the portion sizes of some of her recipes are humongous (one cup of rice per serving seems way too much). The second is that lots of the recipes are big on sodium and starch: lots of white rice, noodles, and processed, frozen potatoes. My guess is that the size of the portions reflects the fact that Americans over-eat (just think of the typically huge portion sizes handed out at restaurants) as well as the fact that many Americans, confronted by high food prices, opt for bulky foods that fill them up but aren't especially nutritious. It's a constant problem in this country: those with money can best afford to eat healthily, and the rest of us eat as best we can.
I'd suggest supplementing Rae's book with one on square-foot gardening--something like Mel Bartholomew's All New Square Foot Gardening (2006). It's astounding how many nutritious, tasty, and cost-cutting vegetables can be grown in very limited space in backyards, rooftops, pots, and windows. It's also a good idea to hit up your local community center and ask for classes on how to preserve vegetables and fruits (dig out those dusty mason jars from the attic). Processed foods are only going to get more expensive.
Great food - Great Advice June 14, 2008
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
Great advice in this book. Helps me keep on track with my money and I really have saved a lot of money using the advice in this book on how to shop, when to shop. I even went to Jaci Rae's personal stuff and found out how to get free gas, so the book was great and the advice on Jaci Rae's was great too. Since I'm a single guy this helps me a lot with budgeting, especially now that food prices are so high. Even with high prices, I spent less money than Jaci Rae listed with her advice. Jaci Rae even listed stores that were in my city in the book and I liked that.
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