Mushroom potstickers: $1.68/serving

Though these aren’t the best-ever potstickers, which by definition must involve pork*, they just might be the best vegetarian/vegan potstickers. Two kinds of flavorful mushrooms (or more, depending on your budget) sautéed with green onions, cilantro, soy sauce, sherry, sugar, and oyster sauce (or vegan oyster sauce), and that’s it. They’re easy enough for a weeknight meal if you’re used to making potstickers by hand, or a great appetizer choice for a mixed-crowd dinner party or potluck. You’ll never go back to the processed, frozen-in-a-bag kind again.

Baked orzo with beef & mushrooms: $1.21/serving

Nothing particularly brilliant or groundbreaking about this meal; I had a little bit of beef sirloin and a small bowl of chopped shallots that needed to be used up, as well as a can of whole tomatoes from the pantry that was already two months past its sell-by date (one of the pitfalls of buying in bulk at Grocery Outlet). It would’ve been easy to just grind up the beef and make a simple sauce to serve over pasta, but I added mushrooms and orzo and chose to bake it for something a little different. If this sounds like it might be up your alley, feel free to experiment with different kinds of ground meat, different mushrooms, and even different cheese (I used Parmesan because it’s what I had), as your budget permits.

Chinese takeout-style pork lo mein: $1.86/serving

Given the popularity of last month’s orange chicken and sesame noodles, I thought it’d be worth taking another crack at some Chinese “takeout” for under $2 a serving. (It should be noted that although it’s a smaller serving than what you’d receive at a restaurant, it’s not dramatically smaller.) Employing the help of Cook’s Illustrated, I think I was able to pull off a version that’s pretty dang close to the real thing. In fact, not only was it about three times as flavorful, it was missing about three times the amount of grease. As I recommend in the actual recipe, it’s worth investing in a large bag of dried shiitake mushrooms (available at all Asian markets) for this and other meals that call for shiitakes; they’re about one-third the price of fresh, and the liquid left over from reconstituting them makes an amazing mushroom stock or soup broth you can freeze for later.

Polenta with mushroom bourguignon: $1.37/serving

You may have noticed a dearth of beef recipes in the lineup lately. This is because it’s been quite some time—months, actually—since I’ve been able to locate a new cache of beef for under $2.99 a pound. There’s none left in our chest freezer, and grocery store discount- and sale-bin searches have come up empty. Thankfully, this beefless beef bourguignon was so satisfying that I hardly miss it. Mushrooms have a lot of the same flavor compounds as beef, so they make a fantastic (not to mention healthier) substitute in both this recipe and many others that call for beef. Try it!

Baked oat groats with mushrooms, epazote & cotija cheese: 96 cents/serving

Also known as Got Too Excited at the Mexican Market and Had No Idea How to Use Up What I Bought. I didn’t have any immediate plans for a bunch of fresh epazote and the little wheel of cotija cheese I found on markdown for $1. I had originally tried to make Salvadorean pupusas, which were edible, but the creation was too fussy and difficult to inflict on readers. (Believe it or not, I don’t post everything I make here; just dishes that are both worthy of making again and that I feel are possible for folks to successfully re-create on their own.) Instead, I decided to use the oat groats I still had on hand from the oat groats with blue cheese, walnuts & spinach and cook them as one would cook traditional arroz verde, in broth puréed with herbs. It turned out to be a great introduction to epazote, whose flavor can be kind of overwhelming on its own. If you can’t find fresh epazote (I don’t recommend dried), cilantro or parsley, or a mixture of the two, can be substituted.

Whole-chicken dinner with vegetables: $2.29/serving

This is one of my favorite meals to make: Not only does it utilize every last scrap of the chicken, but it takes the logical tack that intact whole birds—whether chickens or turkeys—don’t really cook that well. The breasts cook faster than the thigh, the thighs cook faster than the wings, and so on. The solution: Cut the chicken up and cook each part separately yet concurrently (in its own stock and/or fat!) to ensure each section is at its best. This stupendous idea and accompanying recipe came from an old Mark Bittman column in the New York Times Magazine. I recall being so excited I ripped the page out of the magazine before I had even finished reading it, which is probably the first and only time I have ever done that. I implore you: Any time you find yourself craving roast chicken, give this technique a try instead.

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.

Gemelli with mixed mushrooms & thyme: $2.30/serving

Despite Portland’s reputation as a bourgeois-bohemian utopia, not every neighborhood is a paragon of progressivity and educated food consumption. In fact, odds are if you’re under 40, work in a profession that requires a liberal-arts degree, and still insist on living in more than 800 square feet within city limits, your neighborhood probably teems with options for brass knuckles and powdered urine for drug tests, but not so much celery root, rye berries, or artisan goat cheese. Normally this dearth is the case for much grumbling and rending of garments, but every now and then it pays unexpected dividends, usually at the expense of confused supermarket checkout clerks used to ringing up cases of Top Ramen and Mountain Dew. I’ve had pine nuts rung up as macadamia nuts and expensive Walla Walla sweets rung up as cheap yellow onions, but my absolute favorite grocery-store goof of all time is for mushrooms.*

Splurge: short-rib lasagna: $3.74/serving

Picture your current idea of lasagna: red sauce, ground beef, watery ricotta, mozzarella, maybe some spinach or even sausage for interest. Got it? Good. Now crumple it up and throw it away. Maybe even stomp on it a little. Because this is The Best Lasagna Ever. I know a lot of people lay claim to “the best” lasagna, and while some versions very are good, none of them come even close to the majesty that is Short-Rib Lasagna. (Capitalization intentional.) Everything from the tender, deeply flavored shreds of beef to the rich béchamel and tangy cheese does nothing but highlight the abject inferiority of other lasagnas. So long as you’re willing to splurge on the price of ingredients, this is a must-make.

Guest Post: sausage, bacon & mushroom calzones: $2.03 each

Note: This is one of approximately three times my husband, B., has cooked in the entire history of our relationship, and not only did he volunteer to do it (and write a post about it), the result was embarrassingly better than whatever I would’ve made with the same ingredients. Not only is the gig up on his “I can’t cook” excuse, the status of his being cooked for seven days a week is officially in jeopardy.