Green Pancakes

You asked for them, and here they are: The bona fide kid- and adult-pleasing spinach breakfast pancakes made famous by my food-stamp challenge article. Given that I seem to have given birth to the one kid on earth who doesn’t like smoothies, ensuring adequate vegetable consumption has been a years-long process of trial-and-error, with these being the most successful result. They don’t taste like spinach in the slightest despite being quite obviously packed with it, and the fact they’re whole wheat is barely perceptible. We always have a freezer stash of these individually wrapped and ready to just pop in the toaster (or microwave) on busy school mornings. I promise they’re cheaper and healthier than anything you could find in the grocery-store freezer aisle.

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.

Sausage and Dijon polenta: $1.65/serving

I do not, have never, and will never understand people who buy those tubes of pre-made polenta. It’s cornmeal—the same stuff you can get at the bulk bin for like 25 cents a pound. You want it sliceable? Cool it in a loaf pan lined with plastic wrap and invert it. You want it soft and creamy? Eat it right away. It’s versatile, filling, and can be as gourmet or lowbrow as you want to make it. This particular version happens to be an extremely flavorful last-minute way to use up some on-sale ($1.99/lb. kielbasa at Grocery Outlet!) or about-to-expire sausage—just add a cup of cornmeal, some stock, and some extras you probably already have kicking around your fridge, and you’ve got a meal.

Greek pasta salad with spinach and mint: $1.37/serving

Now that the weather has warmed up (although in Portland, “warmed up” means it’s no longer 32 degrees every night; more like a balmy 39), our garden mint has taken it upon itself to intrude on the personal space of nearly every plant in a 10-foot radius. I understand this is What Mint Does—and don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to have anything green growing in the garden at all at this point—but it does create a dire need to use mint at least a couple times a week, to avoid wasting any of the prunings. I used to make mint chocolate chip ice cream at least once a week for this very purpose, but since our ice cream maker broke (has anyone else had this problem, with the Kitchen Aid bowls? After only two years it sprung a leak right where the dasher fits in, oozing an extremely toxic-looking electric-blue fluid), I’m having to get a little more creative.

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.)

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.

Butternut squash risotto with spinach & pine nuts: $2.28/serving

Not an easy week this is, with so many dinners over $2. However, some meals are worth surviving the rest of the day on bread and coffee for, and this is one of them. Butternut squash used to be a hard sell for me (texturally, it still kind of is) until I had it in a risotto at a restaurant not long ago, in which the sweet chunks of squash against a savory background made me a believer. That particular risotto, though, was so heavily loaded with butter and cheese that it took me nearly two days to find the strength to even walk the dog. To say I felt disgusting is to describe the Republican-candidate debates as mildly alarming. Good food needn’t always be an assault on your system; this version gets big flavors from stock, vegetables, and cooking technique, not fat.

Gemelli with yogurt, spinach & caramelized onions: $1.27/serving

I love caramelized onions. Like, really, really love them. If they knew how much, they’d probably take out a restraining order. The only reason I don’t eat them morning, noon and night is because my husband is a recent arrival to the onion party (which is a mystery to me, because remember the cabbage party? THIS is the onion party) and is still made slightly uncomfortable by the sight of onions so defiantly alone and reveling in their onion-ness.

That said, this dish tastes about a hundred thousand times better than it looks in the picture. I can’t believe how much flavor tangy yogurt brings out in caramelized onions. I really couldn’t stand the “it tastes like candy” ploy as a kid—nothing ever, ever tasted like candy, except for candy—but against the backdrop of yogurt and spinach, these onions really do. I swear.