Whole grain & celery salad: $1.05/serving

This is a deceptively easy and satisfying dish that can be made using ingredients you probably already have on hand. It’s chewy, lightly crunchy, briny, and sweet, and works perfectly as a lunch (provided you’re having an equally inexpensive dinner), light dinner, or side dish for you non-budgeting folks. It’s also vegan and sit out for long periods, which makes it perfect for potlucks. As with the cabbage rolls, any whole grain—farro, barley, oat groats, rye berries—can be used.

Whole grain-stuffed cabbage rolls with currants & pine nuts: $1.91/serving

First off, it’s near physically impossible to take an appetizing-looking photo of a cabbage roll, so I apologize. Second, I normally make these in the slow cooker and this time chose to make them in the oven, a method I’m not entirely sure I prefer. But, caveats aside, they’re a delicious alternative to meat-filled cabbage rolls, and if you’re averse to the whole cabbage-roll thing (which I completely understand; when I first encountered them a few years ago, I thought they were the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen, but have since grown to appreciate and even love them), the filling on its own makes a great salad or side dish.

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.

Oat groats with blue cheese, walnuts & spinach: $1.98/serving

This dish was adapted from a recipe that uses an unfortunate euphemism for oat groats: “warm oat berries.” Maybe I’m just being juvenile, but that sounds a lot more unappetizing than “oat groats.” The oat groat is the original whole grain of the oat. A lot of people might not think of oatmeal as a processed food, but indeed it is—even the super-wholesome-seeming steel-cut or rolled oats are simply oat groats that have been chopped up or pressed and then baked. Groats take a while to cook, however, which is why I happen to find them better suited to dinner. They offer a very mild oat flavor with a satisfying chew not unlike farro, and lend themselves to a variety of salad or side dish applications.