Erin Chase's cookbook, $5 Dinner Mom
Amazon.comAt best, five dollars gets you fed at a fast food stop -- but feeding your entire family? You wouldn't think so. Enter Erin Chase, creator of popular recipe site $5 Dollar Dinners, where since 2008, she's shared recipes and cooking instruction to the world who are looking to stretch a buck. Chase's website quickly took off, landing the spinoff cookbook The $5 Dinner Mom Cookbook and her new collection of recipes, The $5 Dinner Mom: Breakfast and Lunch Cookbook.

When trying her recipes out, the first thing you notice is that simplicity is at the heart of every one. You're never doing too many steps and because the limit is set at $5, you're not incorporating a slew of ingredients to confound you. Such is a great notion for not only those looking to save money, but for also for those who might feel threatened by the kitchen altogether. In other words, Chase's creations are simple, fast and cheap -- the survival skills any working family needs in their back pocket.

KitchenDaily spoke with Chase from her home in Dayton, Ohio.

How long have you been doing the "five dollar" menus?
EC: Two-and-a-half years. Back in August 2008, when the gas prices were four or five bucks a gallon, we were on one income and had to cut back somewhere. We're pretty simple but we were forced beyond our budget. I went from spending $500 a month at the store, down to $200 or $250. I started 5dollardinners.com in August of '08 and was approached by a different publisher in November of '08, but ended up signing with a literary agent and going a different direction. I started this as a way to help other people but didn't think that it would be a career.

Have you noticed the prices going up over the last few years in food?
EC: Yes and no. I live in the middle of the Midwest. I've done price comparisons around the country and I'd really only say that New York City is significantly higher across the board. Here, the prices almost went down for awhile. It's usually one product at a time and not something across the board. Products that don't go on sale as often, I've seen a price increase. Obviously, keeping your limit to just $5.00, you're going to be limiting your ingredients.

But in doing so, it makes recipes very simple-in that you don't have to be a cooking braniac to master these.
EC: I have three kids -- I don't have time to be researching new cooking methods. I'm a busy mom just like every mom. We need simple and easy and what I think is great about this, it brings variety in. Breakfast, it's just so easy to have cold cereal. Even for me, lunch is the hardest. I could be creative every day if I wanted. Lunch is sort of the forgotten meal. So I'm hoping it will help people see beyond sandwiches and cold cereal, even if it's just once or twice a month.

When using such a small amount of ingredients, what's key to finding flavor?
EC: That is tricky. I'll go through phases, where I'm using the same ingredients over and over in different ways. I think it's just being creative with the flavor combinations. This isn't in the book, but I just put it on the website yesterday. I made this angel food cake, that I found on Epicuriuous. I can never cook from there because it's usually too expensive, but I found this dessert recipe. All I needed was pistachios and I had a coupon for those. The rest of it is just baking staples. Another part of it is, I think a lot of people don't know...my generation, I didn't grow up with a Mom teaching me how to cook. Part of it is, we don't know how to cook from scratch and have a fear of experimenting. During these economic times, you're afraid to waste money if it doesn't turn out well. So you get stuck with your 7-10 family favorites and you're afraid to branch out of that.

Are coupons still a big thing for you, or are there other money saving ways?
EC: Coupons are totally essential for certain ingredients I'm dealing with. I got something like 50 cans of tomatoes the other week for something like less than 20 cents a can. If you can get those for nearly free, it ups what you can do with the five dollars. Certain ingredients, coupons are essential. What I tell people, if you want to shave off some money, first do it with meal planning. The second step is adding the couponing. There are so many blogs out there these days that do the coupon match-ups for you. These women and men are shopping in your stores and finding prices.