Getting Started on This Week's Dinners

I know, summer's officially gone, and I should be celebrating the arrival of fall with menus centered on things like acorn and butternut squash. But unlike spring and summer, when we cherish the arrival and sometimes brief seasons of things like pea shoots or sugar snap peas, when the winter squash arrives, we know we'll be looking at it for a long, long time. Since it keeps well in a cool place, stock up now with the good organic winter squash sales currently going on at Lucky's, Sunflower, and Whole Foods, but don't expect to find it in this week's menus, because I'm just not ready to go there.

So to get started with tonight, I'm betting on more fresh, local corn while we can still get it. A big corn chowder would give us something for our midweek quick reheat dinner too, but we've already done at least two formal versions of corn chowder in the past few weeks, so I'm thinking of a different spin this time. Sprouts has cod this week for $5.99/lb, which would make for a great cod chowder with fingerling potatoes from Bon Appetit (easily skipping the saffron if you choose). But wait, that chowder is looking a whole lot like the base for a corn chowder, so let's just toss in some corn kernel scraped off some fresh ears from Munson Farm while we can still get them. Voila, cod and corn chowder. And if corn unexpectedly disappears for the season, you still have dinner.

Next, fresh, wild salmon is another item we need to enjoy in these last few days we can. With all those good sale prices over on the left, pick some up to put on the grill for an early fall bbq. Perfect with just a squeeze of lemon. While the grill is going, consider grilled corn succotash from Cooking Light. I like this recipe with edamame instead of lima beans (edamame currently on sale at Sunflower but should always be in your freezer anyway).

For Sunday, with our cooler temperatures, we can get back into comfort food coming from the oven, but I'm just not ready for it to be winter squash. To enjoy the eggplant that you'll find everywhere right now, I'm trying a recipe for eggplant parmesan that's in this month's issue of Cooking Light. Love the idea of coating the eggplant with panko and baking it first, instead of working with greasy fried slices. This will also incorporate some of my bumper crop of basil.

That at least will get us through the weekend, with more planning to come.