Roasted strawberry, goat cheese & black pepper soufflé: $1.49/serving

Yep. More strawberries. Unfortunately, my stomach is now too big for me to bend over and pick them myself, so I have to rely on B., who not only works 12 hours some days, but is also saddled with the myriad other tasks I’m now unable to do. (Weeding, picking up dog poop, et al.) Needless to say, we’re still getting them, just not always before time and the sun have taken their toll. I admit this recipe is something of a work in progress; I’ve noted changes I’d still like to institute for next time, and tinkering at all levels is welcome…just let me know what you did and how it turned out. It should be served with salad and a lot of balsamic vinaigrette to pour over both the soufflé and greens.

Roasted celery root and bacon soufflé: $1.80/serving

I make quite a few savory dinner soufflés on the $35-a-week budget, both because we can use our backyard hens’ eggs and because it’s a great blank canvas for odds and ends. This week’s stockpile consisted of a few stray frozen strips of bacon and a nice, firm celery root I bought after failing to locate any other appealing in-season vegetables. (It probably doesn’t help that I hate asparagus, which is everywhere right now. How someone decided that stuff was edible will forever be beyond my comprehension.) I knew the two flavors would work well together after the success of February’s celery root and beer soup, so I figured I’d try them out in a new format. I have to say, it definitely worked; roasting the celery root allowed for a concentrated-enough flavor to stand up to the bacon, and using bacon fat as a base for the béchamel infused the whole thing with noticeable but unobtrusive hints of pork and smoke. Très délicieux!

Mushroom & goat cheese soufflé: $2/serving

Now that the chickens are laying again, the specter of inferior soufflés has finally lifted. Not that the past two soufflés I’ve made with store-bought eggs weren’t good; they were just…well…inferior. The whites were harder to separate and took longer to beat; the base didn’t thicken as well with the pale, runny yolks; and the finished product just didn’t rise as high. In fact, you can see a dramatic difference between the first soufflé I made with store-bought eggs and both this one and the cheese soufflé I made before the chickens stopped in the fall. You may also remember that the one I made with cauliflower (also with inferior eggs) was paler and visibly less sturdy. If you’re intimidated by making a soufflé, don’t be—it only takes one or two tries to get it down, and it’s a quick, versatile, impressive dish to have in the arsenal. This soufflé can be made with any mushroom you have on hand or can find on sale, dried or fresh. I used dried shiitakes, which are dirt-cheap at the Asian grocery.

Cauliflower soufflé for people who hate cauliflower: $1.19/serving

Regular readers of this blog would probably not be shocked to know I don’t like cauliflower. I suppose I can understand how someone hundreds of years ago with limited options for sustenance could look at this odious, mealy brain-like thing and think “This looks edible!,” but today? In this day and age? Still, like most people in their 30s, it’s come to my attention that eating more vegetables is actually really important, so I’m always on the lookout for ways to sneak the ones I really hate into my diet. Making a purée seemed to work pretty well in the case of a broccoli pesto I made last year, so why not use the same technique with something equally versatile, like a soufflé?

Splurge: coffee crème brûlée: 95 cents each

You may have noticed there are only three desserts on this entire site, and two of them are crème brûlées. There’s no particular reason for this other than the fact I don’t really like making dessert, and not only can crème brûlée be made in advance, it offers the most bang for the dessert-making buck. Smooth, cold, creamy custard topped with a shatteringly crisp crust: What’s not to like? I made these coffee ones for a dinner we were having with my father-in-law, to complement the beef-heavy main dish. If you’re sensitive to sugar, you might want to reduce the amount to 1/3 cup or so. Otherwise, everything about this—from the amount of coffee flavor to the custard texture—is spot-on.

Roasted garlic & rosemary grits soufflé: $1.05/serving

This is not only a diversion from my usual cheese soufflé, but it’s the first soufflé I’ve ever made with store-bought eggs. Words cannot describe how much I hate this. The days are now officially too short for chickens to lay without artificial light, and I’m not about to risk burning the house down—or the coop itself—with an extension cord snaked hither and yon through the yard. I know it’s a natural biological process (the lack of eggs, not the house burning down), but I still hope that somewhere deep in the chickens’ tiny pea brains they feel a little bit ashamed.

Garden Tips: molting hens

It’s difficult to overstate the savings we’ve realized from having layer hens. Chicks themselves are inexpensive—you can buy one for about the price of a dozen organic eggs—and their coop, which doesn’t take up all that much space, can be built out of recycled material. My husband built the bulk of ours from pallets and wood we found for free on Craigslist. If you let the chickens roam about in the yard during the day, they fill up on insects and don’t eat too much feed, and the difference in egg quality between what you get from them versus what you get at the store is rather shocking.

Splurge: pumpkin crème brûlée: $1.38 each

It probably goes without saying that we rarely—if ever—eat dessert. It’s not in the budget, and thankfully we’re not big dessert people to begin with. I do, however, make dessert when we host Thanksgiving each year (which, unfortunately, does not make for a $35 week), and because I like to make something different each time, it usually requires a bit of practice.

Cheese soufflé: 98 cents/person.

Thanks to our three layer hens, some kind of savory soufflé is always in the dinner rotation at our house. The basic formula is the same, so it’s easy to add in whatever you happen to have on hand for a quick weeknight meal. (Contrary to popular belief, soufflés are not at all hard to make…so long as you’re sober and paying careful attention to what you’re doing. I did not in any way learn this from personal experience, no siree. Nothing to see here.)

This formula is for basic Parmesan cheese, which we almost always can find on sale somewhere and is flavorful enough to stand on its own. We’ve also used mozzarella and thrown in some basil and chopped tomato—the combinations are limitless, but if you’re using a mild-flavored cheese it’s probably wise to throw in something complementary like a handful of herbs, sauteed vegetables, or some caramelized onions.