The Week's Dinners, Minus T-Day

I usually figure out Friday through Sunday's dinners on Friday, then laze my way through the weekend, thinking about workweek dinners. However, with the demands of Thanksgiving coming up, it's time to get more efficient. Hence, here's a list that can take you from tonight all the way through Wednesday. The planning is based not only on this week's natural grocery deals, but also becoming increasingly quick and simple as T-Day approaches, cutting down on the number of leftovers created by the dinners, and cooking anything but poultry as Thanksgiving nears.

So for tonight, with haddock on sale at Sprouts for $4.99/lb, and easily interchangeable with cod, I'm thinking cod, potato, and fennel casserole, from Gourmet magazine. This can also make use of the organic russets that are just $1.50 for a five pound bag at Vitamin Cottage, plus gives us a big casserole for a quick reheat later in the week.

Then, I've been wanting to try winter squash and pork stir-fry from the New York Times, and this looks like a good weekend for it. It calls for pork shoulder, which I'd find a little too fatty for this type of dish, so with boneless pork loin chops or roasts just $1.99/lb at Sprouts this week, I'll substitute either of those, chopped up. We're surrounded by winter squash, a rare thing I'm willing to buy in conventional, which is 49 cents a pound at Sprouts. However, their organic butternut squash is just 69 cents a pound this week, so I'd jump on that instead. Not sure if we'll serve it over brown rice or sobas, sounds good either way.

Now we start cutting down on dinner size, so that the fridge won't be crowded with leftovers as Thanksgiving approaches. Since chicken sausage doesn't look much like a bird, we'll use it as our one poultry dinner before Thanksgiving, sauteing them with onions, peppers, and a little pasta sauce, then putting them in nice crunchy baguette sections. No leftovers, and chicken parmesan sausage is $2.99/lb at Sprouts this week.

On to weekday cooking, so we'll jump right into our reheat, the cod, potato, and fennel casserole, with something like chard quickly sauteed with garlic and crushed red pepper on the side.

Speeding things up even more for Tuesday's dinner, we'll turn to a cupboard staple, making tuna casserole using Annie's wonderful boxed macaroni and cheese. Annie's mac and cheese goes on sale periodically for as low as $1 a box, so it's always in the cupboard. It's great made with the plain yogurt option on the package. Toss in a can of tuna and maybe some defrosted green peas, and you have a modern tuna casserole, done in minutes.

Finally, for a quick non-poultry, non-leftover dinner for Wednesday, we'll turn to the pork chops on sale for $1.99/lb at Sprouts (Sprouts seems to be winning this week). Since I'm thinking of omitting sweet potatoes from this year's Thanksgiving dinner, we'll probably bake yams for a side dish, and Sprouts has organic yams for 88 cents a pound. Baked yams are even better than baked white potatoes, IMHO.

So that takes us right up to Thanksgiving day - more about that later.