Every week on Saturday night or Sunday morning I plan out the week’s meals and figure out what groceries I’m going to need to buy in order to make them. Being both a person with a full time job and limited spare time as well as a good little hippie I like to make as few trips to the grocery store as possible each week to save on both time and gas. Some weeks I do better than others. This is turning into one of the not better weeks.

I decided on five springtime dinners for the week and two possible breakfasts should I ever be up early enough to make breakfast and still be on time to work. The dinners were 1) roast chicken served with braised kale and sliced potatoes with sautéed spring onions, 2) pasta with a sauce of mixed greens, white wine, and shallots, 3) spring onion, ham, and potato soup served with crusty homemade bread, 4) Shepard’s pie, and 5) Jody’s casserole (Nick’s mother’s recipe, which is not seasonal but does make Nick happy) with a salad of lettuce, red onion, and cannelloni beans.

All the recipes used either stored winter veggies or my few springtime finds and I decided to go with the pasta dish for tonight because Nick was getting off work late and I thought it would be quick to make. Haha, boy was I wrong.

I started out mincing shallots, crying all the while as though a near relative had died. I then got the butter out of the fridge and reached under the counter for the wine…and realized that there was no wine. We had our bottle of white a few days before when some friends came over for dinner.

No matter, a quick trip to the general store down the street and a bottle of decent Australian chardonnay was procured.

I removed the stems and ribs from my greens and started hacking them into bite sized pieces while the water for the pasta came to a boil and the shallot sauce reduced. I dumped the pasta into the water and went to the fridge for the ricotta cheese. Umm…ricotta? Where are you ricotta? Not here? I know that I had bought cheese at the store, but it was definitely not here now. Suddenly I realized what had happened, in my haste to clean the fridge yesterday I had tossed out a number of suspicious containers including one which I had at the time thought to contain cottage cheese but I now knew to contain ricotta. Damn.

I seriously considered just leaving the ricotta out, but it didn’t make sense. I had wanted to use some sort of creamy Italian cheese in this dish to bind it together and add a little protein without changing the flavor too much. So, after turning off all the stove burners I double checked my mental list of ingredients (of course I left the written list at work, where else would I leave it?) and drove to the grocery store for ricotta cheese. Unfortunately for me the only small container they had was organic and just as expensive as the big containers, but I hate to waste food so I bought it anyway. At least it’s whole milk, so it’s yummy.

Finally, over an hour after I started, I finished the meal. I stirred the shallot sauce into the wilted greens mixed with ricotta and cooked it until it thickened up. Then we grabbed bowls and scooped the sauce onto the pasta.

How was it? Good. Was it good enough to justify two trips to the grocery store as well as one to each the farmer’s market and the general store? I don’t know about that. But if can manage to buy all the ingredients at once I’d say it’s worth making. It’s a nice light pasta that’s good for a warm spring evening.

The Recipe.