The Rest of This Week's Dinner Ideas

Time to get moving with our weekday dinner planning. It has been awhile since red meat has appeared in our menus, and I'm finally in the mood for food suitable to autumn, so I'm thinking about baked potatoes with spiced beef chili from Bon Appetit. You can get a 5 pound bag of organic russet potatoes at Whole Foods for just $2.50 through Tuesday, and burger is always a cheap option (and currently on sale at Sunflower). The vinegar in the recipe adds a nice touch, and I agree with the reviewers who say to lighten up on the cinnamon.

Then of course we made a large dish over the weekend that will serve as a quick midweek reheat, in this case the cod, potato, and fennel casserole. A veggie or salad on the side and you're done.

With winter squash just 99 cents a pound at Sunflower through Wednesday, it's time to start indulging my love of butternut squash, which will get me through the winter. We haven't yet had a rice dish this week, and shrimp are also on sale at Sunflower, suggesting butternut squash risotto with shrimp from Bon Appetit. A $1 bunch of organic kale grabbed at Whole Foods before their sale ends Tuesday would be good sauteed on the side.

For our final weekday dinner before the planning starts all over again, I'm thinking of an experiment, which might be foolhardy for a Thursday evening, but the recipe looks worth it. I've been checking out (literally - thank you library!) Mark Bittman's new book, The Food Matters Cookbook, and there's a pasta dish in it that intrigues me. It's one-pot pasta with zucchini and chicken, and since it's from the new book, it doesn't have a link. With chicken tenders $1.99/lb through Wednesday at Sprouts and organic zucchini just $1 a pound through Tuesday at Whole Foods, this sounds like a winner. The basic idea is to brown chicken chunks, remove them, saute onions and garlic, then put back the chicken and add a lot of zucchini. Then comes the kinky part - instead of cooking the pasta separately, you add some wine and stock, then cook the pasta right in the dish. I've done that plenty of times with soups like pasta e fagioli, but never in a regular pasta dish, gotta try it.

And that will do us for the week.