I’ve had quite a few people ask how Dining On A Dime (formerly Not Just Beans) came to be, so for those of you who are interested, here's my story: Money was scarce when I was growing up. My father left us when I was 10 years old, leaving my mother to provide for us and to pay off my dad’s debts on a small income. I can remember times when we had no power to operate our heater in the winter (in Wichita, Kansas) or when we had no money for the groceries and often scraped by on $15 a week for groceries. Despite the financial hardships, my mom was able to pay off our house and the debts with virtually no income, but we didn’t feel deprived. When I was in high school, my mother, my brother and I were all diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. This illness made it impossible for my mom to work a traditional job. Again, we had to rely on our faith and our ingenuity to make ends meet.

My brother's view of me in the kitchen as a teenager!

A few years later, I moved to Colorado where I lived in a camper behind my grandparents’ house while I went to a Vo-Tech school to learn landscape design and greenhouse management. It was at this time, I developed an interest in cooking. I experimented heavily cooking from scratch, usually with disastrous results (though I did not normally need to use a fire extinguisher more than three or four times a week). I developed a reputation with my family who always joked about "Tawra’s cooking". Even a forensics team would not have been able to identify many of my cooking experiments. After I got married, my cooking improved dramatically and I learned a lot homemaking skills from my mother and grandmother. We paid off more than $20,000 in debt from moving and medical expenses in five years on an average income of $22,000 a year. When I was pregnant with our son, the doctor ordered me to stay on bed rest. To keep myself sane, I went out on the Internet and networked with other women who also were expecting babies at about the same time as me. Many of the women posted questions about their financial trouble or about recipes that they needed. I started to realize that I usually had a recipe for what they were trying to find. I also found myself answering a lot of financial questions.

After becoming pregnant with my daughter (six months after my son was born (Yes, I am a glutton for punishment)), my doctor again ordered me to go on bed rest. This time I thought that I could either write a cookbook or go insane. (My family debates whether I wrote a cookbook and STILL went insane! ;-) I came up with the name "Not Just Beans" because I personally don’t like beans and I included very few bean recipes in the book. I wanted to let people know they could eat frugally without living on beans alone. The moral of the story is that sometimes success is forged in the flames of previous disasters. I was known for my fires in the kitchen and everyone laughed at me when I said I was going to write a cookbook. (If you ever meet my mother, ask her about my fried chicken flambee. It will certainly live in infamy.) Take courage in knowing that someone who once couldn’t cook at all wrote this book and is actually using the recipes successfully. It is my desire that this book can help you take control of your financial situation (starting with your grocery budget), cook tasty food and have a good laugh while doing it! Enjoy!