What the heck is Frugal Foodie Moms?
To be honest, the name started as a lark. This was a test site for other frugal living site, Frugal Moms². I put foodie in the middle and thought it was cute. I quickly fell in love. As a mom of five boys, I spend a lot of time in the kitchen, and have lots of recipes and ideas to share. And I felt like I was drowning my readers in them. Why not have a frugal living site completely dedicated to all the yummy things in life? Everyone’s gotta eat, regardless of what’s in your bank account.
A Little History:
Long ago, in the Wild West days of the Internet, I started a cooking website called “Kim’s Kitchen” on Geocities.com. It was full of country clip art and Comic Sans fonts and looked pretty awful, but it was my very first website. I posted my Once a Month Cooking plans there, and they went viral (before that was ever a word). I also started a fan site for Christopher Lowell’s Interior Motives decorating show. I’m still kicking myself for ever letting go of my video tapes of that show! I had most of them recorded but I have no idea where they went (and they weren’t great quality, but still!)
Anyhow, I merged these sites into Frugal Moms, which I ran from 1998 until 2003. The internet was pretty young and blogging wasn’t even a word yet! I built it from scratch, cobbling it together with the best tools and scripts I had at the time. It was time consuming and expensive, but it was a labor of love. The site grew huge and gained national recognition as a place where people could learn to “live better for less”. We were featured on national tv and in newspapers across the country. Our online community was huge.
Then the dotcom crash happened, taking a lot of sites with it. I kept it going for a while but eventually retired it. And life went on. But my love for both cooking and websites never died. For the past 12 years, I mostly used the internet to find new recipes, check email, and buy way too much stuff off Amazon (but always at a good price). I currently work full time in I.T. and now have five kids! That keeps me hopping, and also keeps me in the kitchen. A lot. My passion for food and cooking has only gotten stronger, and my meal plans are still floating around on the internet!
I finally caved, and brought Frugal Moms back online in April of 2015 as Frugal Moms² (they want a fortune for my old domain name!)
What Goes Around, Comes Around
Since I’ve been gone so long from webdesign and development, there’s a lot to learn. I use Word Press, which makes everything 100 times faster than what I had to cobble together years ago. I joined a wonderful community called Food Blogger Pro and have been coming up to speed quickly. I kept hearing about this “Foodie Pro” theme for Word Press, which looked amazing. So I’m on there the other day, and someone tells me that Foodie Pro is on sale for $5! It’s normally $75! I jumped at the chance to try it for so little, thinking I might use it on Frugal Moms². I built Frugal Foodie Moms as a test site to try it out and learning it without wrecking my main site. The name amused me. I kind of liked it. And I really am a Frugal Foodie Mom. I love good food, but I don’t love to spend money. I bet there are plenty of others out there too. Hmm…
I found the Foodie Theme wasn’t quite the right fit for my main site, but enjoyed learning about it. I’ve also felt that some of my content was too food-oriented on my main site and I needed to get back to writing about other aspects of frugal living. So what to do with it all? Hmmm…..
After playing with it for a while and really started to love it, even the name. I could have lots of pretty food photos and recipes on here, without bombarding everyone on the other site all day long with talk of apple noodles, pizza, smoothies, and other stuff. You’ll still see some recipes on both sites, but this will be where I’ll dive a lot deeper into cooking, meal planning, kitchen gadgets, cookbooks and all things foodie!
So I’m finding myself back at the beginning of my journey, in the kitchen with another cooking site! As long as it’s delicious, I don’t mind!
Yours in Frugal Foodie Love,
Kim 🙂
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