I have spent the last few weeks living off the land, as it were. Having blown pretty much all the disposable income on an iPad upgrade, and much of the food budget on a big Bollywood party (where I made a fairly standard chicken/veg curry, but there was a lot of it plus snacks), I have been turning to my freezer.

And frankly, it's now April, and with the CSA starting in just two months, and half a pig showing up any day now, it's long past time for me to clear out the stuff I stashed away over the course of the past year. So I've been using up tomato sauces, and making meals like these fake dosas.

As you probably know, a dosa is a large crepe that's been filled with a bit of a spiced mashed potato mix. Coincidentally, a samosa is a large fried dumpling, also often filled with a spiced mashed potato mix. We make samosas (and by "we", I mean "Cathy" from time to time, and we had two bags of leftover filling taking up space in the freezer.

We also had roti chapati from Costco. A lot, which is redundant when I've already said "from Costco", but I'd bought them for the party, and then people brought bread to the party, and then I had party leftovers the next night, but there was still bread, and then I made another Indian meal and forgot to make them, and then had finally tried them out with a FOURTH Indian meal later on. And I like them a lot.

So I thought, well, I have a mashed potato mixture, and I have something sort of crepelike to roll them in, so I spent some time over my non stick pan puffing up the chapati, some time over a cast iron pan cooking the excess freezing moisture out of the samosa filling, put them together with a salad, and there you go.

In a similar vein, I had a bag of chili from a Monday gaming in the freezer. It was, to be honest, mediocre chili. Perfecty Acceptable Chili, but nothing you'd demand the recipe for. I had also been craving hot dogs.

Ergo. Chili from the freezer, old fashioned wieners from Costco, brat buns from Cub, cheese from the fridge, plus a warm potato salad with shallots, poblano peppers, mustardy viniagrette, and baby kale that I wilted with the heat of the potatoes.

It was shockingly good, and didn't even feel as heavy as you'd think a chili cheese hot dot would feel. I guess making the bits from scratch and dosing them out judiciously makes a difference.

Of course, having bought the hot dogs from Costco, the whole escapade actually left me with more in my freezer than I started out with. Oops. Screwed the tubular pooch on that one.