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Notes -
Seconding the "expensive, delicious, and/or rare" thing. There's a reason that tomatoes are a classic home gardener crop: good tomatoes are so much better than what you can find in the grocery that they are basically two different things, and getting the good stuff from a farmer's market is expensive. Berries are also a great choice, though I will warn you that you probably want to invest in some bird netting or you are likely to get most of your crop stolen (by the birds, I mean).
Some other considerations include whether you are more limited on space or time, and to what extent "fun to grow" is important. If you are space limited and just want good bang for your buck, potatoes are a terrible choice; if you are not space limited and want something easy and fun, potatoes are pretty cool; they don't require much maintenance, and digging for buried treasure at the end of the season is great fun (or at least it was when I was a kid; I've been space-limited as an adult, so...).
Like potatoes, onions, carrots, and other cheap stuff that keeps well are not great choices unless you really have fun with them. Greens (lettuce, cabbage, spinach) are really situational; how bad a problem you have with insects can make or break you. Cucurbits are pretty fun, though I'd go for summer squash / zucchini and cucumbers rather than winter squash, as the risks are higher and relative returns lower for winter squash. I liked growing green beans and snow peas, but YMMV there. Both hot and sweet peppers, if you like them, are, like tomatoes, a great choice. Tomatillos are great fun too, but you need to be a little more careful as they don't self-pollinate and need to be picked before they are ripe.
One thing that might not be obvious is how much the variety you plant can matter. Don't just get stuff off the shelf at Home Depot for most things. If you want to eat fresh green beans, get something good like Fortex instead of whatever the big box store sells. Do your research on tomato varieties and select for the things most important to you. There are a million cool hot pepper varieties that you can pretty much only get from specialty stores; you don't have to grow only jalapenos and banana peppers. In general, starting things from seed is a lot of fun and opens up a world of varieties that you'll never see if you buy starts.
As far as other things to do:
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