Mahogany chicken with chipotle-lime sweet potatoes & cilantro chimichurri: $2.16/serving

If you’re thinking this looks awfully fancy and composed for something I’d come up with on my own, your suspicions would be founded. It’s an oldie but goodie from the Food Network—a recipe I’ve had in the rotation for quite a few years now when I happen to have some chicken thighs to spare (in this case, Costco: $1.69/lb.) and the weather calls for sweet potatoes. Not only are the colors fantastic, but it’s relatively quick to make and is an excellent vehicle for an ending-its-lifespan bunch of cilantro. (If you haven’t yet been enlightened with my tip for making bunches of herbs last for weeks past when they’d normally die a sad, slimy death in the crisper, check it out.)

Sweet potato, apple & spinach salad: $1.47/serving

I make a lot of salads. Most of them I don’t bother posting here, as they’re usually just a mishmash of ingredients I happened to have lying around, paired with produce from the garden and tossed with some vinegar and olive oil. Simple, often boring (by food-blog standards, anyway), and not always good enough to bother re-creating. This salad, however, was an exception. It was originally supposed to be black beans and rice with roasted sweet potato and lime, but, as I came to discover at the last minute, I was out of black beans. Time for Plan B. Thanks to some apples from our neighbor’s tree and some spinach in the crisper, I was able to transmute most of the original ingredients into a salad that’s actually worth revisiting.

Potato “galette”: 11 cents/serving

Last week, when I solicited suggestions for what to do with all these potatoes we pulled up out of the yard, someone suggested a potato galette. Which I thought was a splendid idea—not only would it use up a ton, but it would display their pretty pink and purple insides. Now, this suggestion was probably intended for someone patient enough not only to layer each slice of potato in an attractive manner, but carefully flip the galette over when it came time to do so. I am so not that person, especially when it comes to the “carefully flip” part. It was just B. and I, so why risk a mess and the whole thing sticking to the pan? So this is what we have here. I’m posting it anyway because it’s still delicious—the top potato-chip-crisp, the middle buttery and soft—cheap, and vegetarian, and you’ll probably do a much better job than I did. In fact, I’m including the link for you to see what it’s supposed to look like. (We paired it with other salad fixin’s from the garden and a quick balsamic vinaigrette.)

Black beans and rice with roasted sweet potato & lime: 49 cents/serving

In the realm of cheap-but-filling foods, few things deliver more bang for the buck than a big ol’ pot of beans. Throw in some cooked rice as filler and you can stretch a 50-cent portion of bulk beans for several days, as I was able to do with this meal. The trick of adding balsamic vinegar, sherry and soy sauce to bring out the umami compounds in black beans is an old favorite of mine, courtesy of Bon Appetit, and in this case the flavor perfectly complements the sugary sweet potatoes, tart lime, and earthy-crunchy pumpkin seeds. In fact, this meal is so good it would work for a dinner party (it’s even vegan!), and no one would ever guess the whole thing cost less than $3 to make.

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.

Steak with pepper cream sauce & garlic roasted potatoes: $2.70/serving

This is, I admit, a flagrant violation of my stated “don’t make meat the center of the meal” rule. Not only is meat the center of this meal, it’s steak, the most expensive meat. But as you’ll notice, the entire meal is still under $3, and the plate is equally balanced with inexpensive salad and potatoes. This makes a terrific company dish, as well as a great introduction to eating on a budget for those with steakhouse tastes. (It’s not true steak au poivre because I didn’t use cognac, but if you have some on hand, feel free to make it authentic.)

White sweet potato soup: 77 cents/serving

You may already be aware that there are two kinds of sweet potatoes in U.S. grocery stores—the white kind no one buys, which look like regular potatoes, and the orange-fleshed ones everyone buys, labeled “yams,” but did you know that the orange-fleshed ones aren’t even really yams? THE GROCERY STORE IS LYING TO YOU! (Earth-shattering revelation!) Yams aren’t even potatoes. This issue came into stark relief the other week, when I asked B. to get some sweet potatoes and he came back with the white kind—in other words, the kind properly labeled “sweet potatoes,” even though I was looking for the orange kind but had refused to call them yams. I realized I had never even seen anyone purchase, let alone purchased and used myself, the white sweet potatoes. What were they for? What did they taste like?

Root vegetable and rice gratin: 92 cents/serving

The first time I ever had a traditional gratin, I actually thought I was being virtuous. Look at this! I thought. A dish based entirely on vegetables! That is, until I actually took a bite, and realized the vegetables were nothing but a coagulant for what seemed like an entire carton of cream and a pound of cheese. Don’t get me wrong—I’m a bona fide cheese and cream fan, but it was even too much for me. A single bite was so thick and heavy, the only discernible flavors were fat and salt. This gratin is far from traditional and probably even pushes the definition of “gratin,” but the flavor of each vegetable (you can use whichever ones you like) comes through loud and clear. Plus, you can eat it as a main dish without a whit of guilt.

Vegetable cheddar soup (with bread): 83 cents/serving

If you’re thinking this “vegetable cheddar soup” looks suspiciously like broccoli cheddar soup, that’s because it is broccoli (and cauliflower and potato) cheddar soup. However, that’s only because broccoli is what I happened to have on hand; the most accurate name for this would actually be Clean Out Your Crisper soup. In fact, it’s almost impossible to go wrong here: Any kind of leftover vegetables + broth (chicken or vegetable, or even water) + cheese = soup. You don’t even need to purée it, especially if you’re using greens, and really, any cheese will do. Odds are you have the ingredients in your house to make this RIGHT NOW, for lunch or dinner, for half the price of a sodium-laden, unsatisfying can of Progresso.

Curried root vegetable stew with currant dumplings: $1.17/serving

To be honest, the only reason I even wanted to try this stew was because, unlike the similar root vegetable cobbler I made back in November, it called for my three favorite root vegetables of all time: sweet potatoes, parsnips, and celery root. Unfortunately, momentary amnesia precluded me from remembering where we shop, because of course our grocery store doesn’t have celery root. Did you know this very store that I complain about at least once a week was actually featured a few years back in a somewhat famous photograph, held up across the Internet as an example of All That Is Wrong With This Country? What it lacks in things like porcini, mint (seriously, this store DOES NOT EVEN CARRY MINT), and celery root, it makes up for in six different kinds of Cheez-Its and half an aisle devoted to artificially flavored pudding. So, in a moment of duress and frustration, I grabbed a rutabaga.