French onion soup with bacon: $1.52/serving

For some reason I’ve been really craving French onion soup this week. Trashy French onion soup—extra-cheesy, extra sweet. It’s been hot (read: not soup weather), but as anyone who’s been pregnant knows, once there’s a craving, it doesn’t ever really go away until it’s fulfilled. The budget obviously precludes going out and ordering food at a restaurant like a normal person, so my only solution was to spend part of an 80-degree day sweating over the stove. Thankfully, it was worth it. This is a much different take on the French onion soup I made a few months ago; sweeter, with a little smoke from added bacon. (In the past I’ve complained that bacon overwhelms the soup, but this time I only added a tiny bit and it was perfect.)

Cheese-stuffed mac ’n’ cheese pie: $1.26/slice

I suppose I should preface this post by stating the obvious, given the meal: I’m pregnant. Four months pregnant, to be exact. (For those who’ve seen me in person and wondered how I managed to get quite a beer belly* from eating bread, fruit and mostly vegetarian meals, now you know.) Am I still making it on $35 a week? For the most part, yes. I’m still espousing the principles, baking all my own bread, growing my own food, and making all my own meals, I’m just eating a little more of them, and occasionally making things like this. It basically takes care of all the pregnancy cravings in one go: pie, macaroni and cheese, caramelized onions, and, to top it all off, goat cheese. (As anyone who’s been pregnant recently knows, listeria danger precludes you from having soft cheeses like goat, blue or brie unless they’re heated, leaving very few opportunities for one to get her fix.) In a way, I’m a little sorry I brought something like this into existence because, pregnant or not, I could eat it every day for breakfast, lunch and dinner and never get tired of it. I’m sorry I brought it to your attention as well, because once you try it, your life will never be the same.

Sorrel and onion panade: 60 cents/serving

Although I’m pretty used to baking bread by now, given that I’ve been doing it twice a week for the past nine months or so, occasionally I’ll turn out a loaf that’s just not up to par. The final dough temperature wasn’t warm enough, for instance; the bottom got burned; or, in the case of a particular loaf I made on Thursday, I didn’t dust the proofing basket well enough and half of it stuck to the bottom. Normally I’ll just make bread crumbs out of the most disastrous parts of the bread, but if an entire loaf is a problem, I like to make a panade, which is part bread soup, part bread pudding, and cheap, not to mention addictive—the bread kind of melts into a silky, spoonable bowl of heaven redolent with cheese and caramelized onions, almost like a thickened French onion soup.  Any kind of greens would work, but this time I chose to use the rest of the sorrel from the garden, since it usually bolts once the weather starts getting hot.

Vidalia onion, cheese & rice bake: 94 cents/serving

Let me be straight with you: This is not something I would normally make. It’s very casserole-y, for starters, which is not really my style, and it contains sour cream as a binder, something that always has and always will feel deeply wrong to me. (It’s been only recently—the past year or two, in fact—that I’ve been able to abide sour cream’s existence at all. I mean, it’s soured cream, people.) That said, I’ve been struggling a bit lately to find new and inventive meatless dishes (if you’re wondering how this is even possible, look at my recipe index—what haven’t I tried at this point??), since meat has been quite expensive lately, and when I saw a version of this dish on The Homesick Texan‘s blog, I thought I’d give it a try. I had sour cream on hand from another dish and I had cheese, so I only had to pick up some Vidalia onions to make it work (Walla Wallas would have been the more locally appropriate choice, but alas, they’re not in season). It took me a few bites to warm up to it, but once I did, I was sold; it was extremely filling, so I only needed a small serving to feel satisfied, and the sweet onions contrasted nicely against the heat of the chipotles.

Fried tofu sub sandwich: $1.19 each

Inspired by the General Tso’s fried tofu sub featured on both Serious Eats and in The New York Times, this is a sandwich for meat lovers. I’ve been cooking tofu a long time, and this method of applying a dry-rub to water-expelled tofu (the latter being one of my tweaks), dredging in a slurry of egg white and cornstarch, and covering in panko before frying is something I had never thought of doing, and it completely transformed the tofu into something abjectly un-tofu-like. Super-crunchy on the outside, sweet, soft and flavorful on the inside, it tastes like an illicit state-fair treat or exotic Asian bar snack, not the humble, flavorless tofu you know. Nestled in a sub sandwich with spicy sriracha mayo, lettuce, roasted onions, and lime juice, it’s almost transcendent. I feel compelled to provide fair warning that this is a project—I made both the sub rolls and the mayo from scratch—but it’s completely worth it. (It should also be noted the original sub, from No. 7 Sub in Manhattan, costs $9.)

Baked pasta with sausage, spinach, and sage: $1.59/serving

I admit, this is pretty much exactly what it looks like: a hot mess casserole. The recipe even came out of Faith Durand’s “Not Your Mother’s Casseroles.” But it’s a light casserole, as far as these things go, and the flavors are a little more sophisticated than what you’d expect, with caramelized onions and just enough cheese to hold the whole thing together. To further convince myself this was actually wholesome, I served it with a side salad of assorted mesclun. (And by “mesclun” I mean “the miniature leaves of the only harvestable things in the garden right now,” which would be oak-leaf lettuce, bok choy, and Japanese purple mustard. By way of postscript, for the love of god, don’t put the latter two in a salad. Ever.)

Twice-baked potatoes with Guinness onions & kale: $1.35/serving

This is the last of the on-sale Guinness for this year, I promise. But I just couldn’t resist—fluffy baked potatoes with caramelized onions and Guinness and kale and cheddar cheese? It’s just as good as it sounds. Simple, filling, and less than $1.50 for the extremely generous serving you see on this plate.

French onion soup: 84 cents/serving

I am, admittedly, a French onion soup fanatic. I order it whenever I spot it on a menu, whether it’s an upscale French brasserie or a strip-mall Red Robin, and I’m constantly trying to perfect my own version. I’ve tried recipes with bacon (overwhelms everything), recipes with Vidalias or Walla Walla sweets (too cloying), recipes using a mixture of chicken broth and beef broth (too thin-tasting), red onions versus yellow onions, $25-a-pound Gruyère versus store-brand Swiss cheese, you name it. The perfect French onion soup, in my mind, should be beefy and full-bodied, cheesy but not all about the cheese, and redolent with caramelized-onion flavor without being too sweet. And, at long last, I believe I’ve been able to strike that balance, using an ingredient I actually had set aside for another dish.

Stuffed onions: $1.32/serving

This is such a brilliant idea that I can’t believe I haven’t seen it elsewhere (including my own mind): stuffed shells using a thin layer of poached onion in place of pasta. When cooked, the onions layers curl up to look and act every bit like a pasta shell, and provide a much more interesting textural and flavorful contrast to the filling. Even B., an avowed onion-hater who normally wouldn’t touch something like this with a ten-foot pole, scarfed them down and, dare I say, even enjoyed them. An actual serving is bigger than the photo above (I didn’t want to crowd the plate), and goes great with a simple garden salad. (The one above features freshly picked grated beets—our first harvest of anything other than lettuce since about August.)

Pizza with Yukon Golds, caramelized onions, blue cheese & bacon: $1.36 each

Given the abundance of tomatoes and basil in our garden during the summer, pizza has become sort of a seasonal thing around here. Which is too bad, because having the oven on at high temperatures is a great way to warm up the house, especially if you have an oil-burning furnace like we do. (Being from California where everyone has electricity or natural gas, I originally pictured an oil-burning furnace as some sort of iron-clad Depression-era boiler that looked like it came off a submarine, but was disappointed to discover it looks like any other furnace.) Did you know heating oil costs more than gas right now? Because it does, and this causes me great anxiety any time we turn the thermostat over 60 degrees, so I’m always looking for auxiliary heat sources. Anyhow, this is my attempt at a seasonal pizza for January, using garlic oil in place of tomato sauce and thyme leaves in place of basil. It definitely doesn’t scream “PIZZA!,” but it’s still pretty damn good.