More Dinners For This Week

It seems exceedingly stupid to be chirping about dinner plans while firefighters are battling the Fourmile Canyon blaze, the smoke from which we can see nearly everywhere in Boulder. At least it sounds like the current winds are expected to die down this afternoon, which is wonderful in terms of the firefighting and also good news regarding tonight's many planned barbeques. A little reminder to always play safe with those fires in the grill.

Since we've already planned through tonight's chicken sausage grill, there really isn't a whole lot more to figure out for the week. We always need a pasta dish, and to continue our celebration of local corn and veggies, we'll go back to a beautiful one for this time of year, pasta with corn, zucchini, and tomatoes, from the New York Times. As I've mentioned before, you can spin this one any way you like, using the fresh herbs that suit your fancy, or taking a Southwestern turn by using chile powder and cilantro. Or maybe roasted green chiles that are popping out all over the place - hadn't thought about that one before.

Of course we have a reprise dinner from the weekend too, an easy reheat of something that took more effort. I'd mentioned a couple of options for chilis and chowders previously, but actually wound up making a vegetarian chile corn chowder I found from an old recipe from Alfalfa's Market, long subsumed through takeovers via Wild Oats and eventually Whole Foods, but now happily slated to make a comeback as an independent store.

Finally, we're still looking for more excuses to use those fresh roasted chiles, and we have tortillas left from the stack that was bought to be a side to the two nights of chile corn chowder, so that spells chicken burritos with chiles and corn, where the roasted chiles are even better than the poblano preparation called for.

So that does it for the week. Let's think good thoughts about the winds dying down and helping out our firefighters.