I recently made homemade phyllo (or filo) for the first time, following instructions I found on YouTube. Every stage was easy until I got to dealing with the stacked sheets of thin dough rolled out to size. There was some sticking and crumpling, but I managed to use the phyllo to make eight triangles of spanakopita, following this recipe.

It is spring here in western Washington state and the local farmers market has had beautiful spinach. I was later than usual getting out the door yesterday because I had an episode of vertigo. I stopped at the health food store for feta and lemons, dreaming of the spanakopita I would eat this week.

Alas, when I got to the market, the farmer I like to patronize most had sold out of everything but dill and turnips. I scavenged around the market and loaded up on salad greens and radishes, a bunch of green onions.

On the walk home I began thinking about what I had in the house. I had andouille and chicken apple sausage and corn in the freezer. I had a small jar of sun-dried tomatoes. I had green onions, cilantro, a lime wedge and the feta I had just bought. I could make a respectable skillet of pasta with those things.

Tonight I did, and I’m eating bites of it between typing this up.

Amounts are loose when I cook pasta. I get out a big skillet with a glass top and start sautéing things in olive oil while the water heats for pasta. I cut two andouille sausages into half moons and added a few half moons of chicken-apple sausage that had been sitting in the refrigerator. I chopped up the white parts of two green onions, saving the green parts for later. When the sausage and onion were in the pan, I shook frozen corn over that layer and snipped four or five dried tomatoes into bite-sized pieces. When the pan started to get dry I poured a bit of water from my boiling pasta into it. I added crumbled feta — I had about three ounces. More pasta water, plus the al dente pasta. Then, at the end, I added the onion greens and some cilantro leaves, squeezed the lime wedge over it all and stirred.

It was a tasty dinner and there is enough left in the skillet for at least two more meals.

What else will I eat this week? Plenty of salads (I had salad for lunch). I’ve got at least one salmon fillet in the freezer. I can have that with a baked potato and some stir-fried bok choy. Or another salad. One of my students sent me her recipe for homemade granola and I made up a batch last week. That and yogurt or milk and dried fruit takes care of breakfast. I’ve got half a dozen eggs and frozen half bagels from the local shop.

I’ll make it through the week and hope to get up early enough to catch the beginning of the farmers market next weekend for more spinach. I found a couple of blocks of feta in the back of the freezer and one vendor has green onions each week right now. Fresh dill is in season and I always have radish greens (I chop them and mix them with spinach, a nod to frugality with no significant alteration in taste).

P.S. For those of you who followed the orange syrup chronicles, the latest thing I made with reserved orange syrup was baked rice pudding, using the orange syrup instead of adding sugar to the cooked rice, milk, eggs, raisins and orange peel. I seasoned it with cardamom — both fresh ground seeds and a dash of cardamom bitters to give it an Indian dessert vibe. It was utterly delicious, if a bit sweet — it’s hard to judge the sweetness before the pudding is baked. Next time I might add some chopped blanched almonds, furthering the Indian profile: for now I just toss a few raw almonds into each bowl of rice pudding. Using sugar syrup instead of granulated sugar means that the pudding takes longer to cook, perhaps twice as long. You want it to be firm before you take it out of the oven and I like to see some browning on the top.