More Dinners For This Week

It might be Halloween, but the dinner planning never ends, so we'd better get going. By tomorrow, it will be time for a pasta dish, and with basil chicken sausage on sale at both Sprouts and Sunflower, I'm thinking just a simple pasta with sausage, peppers, and onion, held together with pasta sauce conveniently coming from a jar (heavens!). If you want to be a little more elaborate, the sauce we made a couple of weeks ago for the mushroom and sausage ragu with polenta would also be delicious over pasta.

Then again we have our reprise of a big dinner made over the weekend, in this case the fabulous black bean chile with butternut squash and Swiss chard, with a salad on the side and a nice hunk of fresh bread from the Whole Foods Bakehouse.

Next, we need something with rice as a base, and with organic bok choy just $1 a pound at Sunflower this week, that spells stir fry. Stir fries are about the most accommodating meals in the world, made with whatever suits your fancy. If looking for a recipe, bok choy with beef from Gourmet looks good, and beef stew meat is $3.99 a pound at Sunflower this week. It would also work subtituting the pork stew meat that's just $2.99 a pound there.

Finally for Thursday (and the sale ingredients need to be bought by Wednesday, the last day of the current sale), I've had good luck once before trying the stuffed chicken breasts that are $3.99 a pound at Sprouts right now. They'll be accompanied by microwaved "baked" potatoes, and I saw large artichokes for just $1 each at Sunflower yesterday. (Looks like there's a bumper crop of beautiful artichokes coming out of California right now.) That would create a rather elegant meal at minimal midweek effort.

And that will do us until next Friday's planning. Don't forget to eat some fruits and veggies along with all that Halloween candy.