Socca

As longtime readers of this blog know, I’m no stranger to making my own pizza. At least, I wasn’t before I became a parent. These days, however, I’m not only short on time, but recognize that eating a big slab of white bread with cheese is probably not the best idea if I’m trying to keep energy levels up. Socca, a sort of flatbread made with ground chickpeas, is not only pizza-like enough to sate a craving, it’s inexpensive, gluten-free, full of protein and, best of all, can be made quickly and easily in a single cast-iron pan. It can also be topped with anything you happen to have on hand. You don’t even need cheese! (This time I’ve used feta, but other times I’ve gone without and it’s been just as great.)

Fancy apple chips: $1

You may have seen packages of these at your local upscale grocery store for anywhere from $3-$6, but did you know that with just 10 minutes of labor and a food dehydrator, you can make two bags’ worth for a buck? They’re sweet, they’re crunchy, they’ve got no added sugar or preservatives, and you can make them year round. They also keep well for vacuum sealing, and are a great holiday-season hostess gift when packed in a cellophane bag with a nice ribbon. Read on for the secret that makes them so inexpensive.

 

Roasted-tomato topping for pasta, bread or polenta: 39 cents/serving

Apologies for the late post, but I have officially entered into the late stage of pregnancy where standing on my feet, at the counter, for long periods of time has gotten almost unbearably difficult. I’m still cooking, mind you, but it’s more in the vein of throwing things together based on the garden and pantry and hoping they cohere enough to be edible before I have to go sit down. The resulting “recipes,” if I remember them at all, are rarely innovative or tested enough to warrant inclusion on the blog. The last thing I made that would be worth your time and trouble to re-create was this roasted tomato dish, utilizing what appears to have been the last big tomato harvest of the summer. It’s nothing fancy, just a big ol’ pile of heirlooms and a few handfuls of sun golds (or whatever tomatoes you have on hand), roasted in olive oil to concentrate their sweetness and topped with basil-garlic bread crumbs. I served it over pasta, but it would also be great over polenta or on bread as a sort of bruschetta.

Panzanella: 18 cents/serving

With compliments to the Italians, panzanella is the original budget meal. The O.G. Sui generis. Some stale bread, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and tomatoes and basil from the garden, and you’ve got yourself dinner. Provided you made your own bread or are using a loaf that otherwise would’ve been thrown out (and have tomatoes and basil in your garden), it shouldn’t cost more than 25 cents or so a serving. And it’s still tasty even after it’s sat for a while, making it an excellent side or potluck dish.

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.

Baked rice with currants and chickpeas: 77 cents/serving

Every now and then I like to go through the cupboards and challenge myself to use up the various little baggies of bulk odds and ends I’ve accumulated over time. Sometimes the yield can get a little random, as was the case in the most recent cleanout: half a box of currants from whole-grained stuffed cabbage rolls and a little baggie of dried chickpeas from creamy farro & chickpea soup. Thankfully I remembered seeing this recipe in Claudia Roden’s The Food of Spain; it’s sort of a vegan/vegetarian paella, which of course is up my alley given that I don’t like seafood; it makes a ton, which is perfect for lunches for the week; it looks cool coming out of the oven; and it’s truly delicious—currants and garlic are not something I would’ve thought to pair, but now that I’ve tried it I can’t believe it’s not used more often.

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.

Splurge: watermelon sorbet: 71 cents/serving

As you may have noticed, watermelons are cheap right now. Like, really cheap. They’re also very large. Like, the size of a small child and 39-cents-a-pound large. Which is great if you’ve got a huge family or plan on putting slices out for a barbecue, but what to do if you’ve got a household of two people who struggle to eat 12 pounds’ worth of watermelon in a week? Buy a cheaper, smaller watermelon that probably costs three times as much per pound? Of course not! Buy the big watermelon, eat half of it, and make this sorbet with the other half. It’s one of the most refreshing summer desserts there is, and if you buy mini chocolate chips (which I didn’t this time), it even looks just like watermelon, which for some reason makes it taste even better.

Rhubarb compote: 37 cents/cup

When I was a kid, my parents used to buy a lot of those wonderfully convenient little cups of Yoplait yogurt. (Of course, these days I would NEVER buy a 60-cent container of pre-sweetened, artificially flavored yogurt, but you’re all welcome to come back and laugh at me once I have kids.) My absolute favorite flavor of all time was strawberry rhubarb, and although Yoplait doesn’t appear to be making it anymore, I admit that part of my motivation in planting rhubarb once we got a garden was to be able to make my own version. We had our first rhubarb harvest in late spring, before we had strawberries, so my first attempt at re-creating the yogurt was rhubarb-only. It was still delicious, but it just wasn’t the same. Luckily, the Pacific Northwest has a second rhubarb harvest, in June, right at strawberry time, so you can imagine what I’ve been eating for breakfast this week. Anyway, this recipe is for the rhubarb component only, because it’s not only great by itself in yogurt if you don’t have strawberries, but it’s delicious on ice cream, biscuits, oatmeal…you get the idea.

Strawberry sorbet: 20 cents/serving

As predicted, our strawberry patch this year is out of control (in a good way), yielding several pounds of strawberries every week. This was all fine and good for a while, but after eating strawberries for lunch, snacks, and dessert for days at a time, we were ready for a different iteration. I make this sorbet every summer after the novelty of plain strawberries wears off, and so far this week we’ve already made two batches of it. It’s pretty simple—just strawberries, sugar, and a little lemon juice (and optional kirsch), but we both prefer it to just about every frozen dessert out there. It’s also a good way to use up ripe strawberries that got half-eaten by slugs—just wash, trim out the bad parts, and store in the freezer until you’ve accumulated one pound.