Last month was horrid on the food budget. I had to restock the kitchen, and I wasn’t exactly the most frugal. I still cringe at how much I spent on food. So this month, I have decided to be better. Part of that was using food that I already have. I had picked up a huge bag of spinach from Costco, and looked in one of my favorite recipe books for a recipe involving spinach. The recipe book was borrowed from my mom and I love it. It’s the original Moosewood Cookbook (the link is for the new one, good luck finding the one published long enough ago to be given to my mom as a wedding present), and features a variety of vegetarian recipies. I’ve loved everything I’ve cooked out of there, and it usually involves lost of vegetables and no meat which is nice.

So this is what I cooked last night for dinner. It was delicious, so I thought I would share it. This is exactly what I did, not necessarily what was in the recipe book.

• 1 cup flour
• 1/3 cup cold butter

Cut together in a food processor. Mix with 3 Tbs. cold water. Chill for over an hour, then make a crust in a 9 inch pie pan.

• 1/2 lbs spinach (or just an approximate amount that was a really huge pile that cooked down a ton)
• 1 small onion

Sauteed onions in butter with pepper, salt and basil, add spinach until wilted

• 1 lb cottage cheese (it’s supposed to be ricotta. But I had cottage cheese)
• 3 beaten eggs (I dropped the eggs from the grocery store. All but 4 broke, although more were salvageable)
• 3 tbs. flour
• 1/2 c. grated cheese

Mixed together everything, put in pie shell. Top with 1 c. sour cream (that was too much, I would use half that next time) and paprika.

Here’s the link for an updated version from the author