Getting Started on This Week's Dinners

Time to get some menus planned, starting with tonight's. With fresh, responsibly farmed tilapia just $4.99/lb at Whole Foods for today only, tilapia will definitely be on the table. It's excellent just quickly sauteed with a squeeze of lemon, a drizzle of balsamic vinegar, or a little fruit salsa on the side. Instead, I'm experimenting with a new (to me) recipe that dates way back in Bon Appetit, New England seafood chowder. It calls for cod or haddock among other possibilities (scrod? - but that is cod or haddock!), and since neither of those would hold together very much, I'm thinking tilapia would be a reasonable choice as well. It's appealing in that it calls for some fine veggies like kale and butternut squash (organic hard squash just 99 cents a pound at Sunflower this week). But the recipe also looks like it could do with significant lightening, cutting the bacon by at least half, using a low- or nonfat milk, and maybe reducing the half and half. Looks like an interesting experiment.

Moving on to Saturday, tomorrow's the last day of National Pizza Week, and since we have yet to celebrate it, obviously we'll have pizza. I love the multigrain fresh dough from Whole Foods, which spreads out to fill an entire rimmed baking sheet. You can improvise with whatever toppings appeal, but a favorite is pizza alla salsiccia, sausage pizza from Cooking Light. The ingredients have to be pretty much doubled to fill the whole baking sheet, and it's so delicious with lots of fennel and tomatoes, and a little bit of sausage (Italian chicken sausage $2.99 a pound at Sprouts this week).

For Sunday, we have yet to capitalize on Sunflower's asparagus sale, $1.77 a pound, so it's time for a pasta with asparagus. I'm very tempted by fettucine with peas, asparagus, and pancetta from Bon Appetit, but that involves cream for the second time in three days, plus the pancetta, so we'll more likely opt for penne with asparagus, spinach, and bacon from Cooking Light. It calls for a modest two slices of bacon, lots of veggies, and no cream. Bet it would be good with a few peas from the freezer tossed in as well, further resembling the richer dish.

And that will get us through the weekend proper, although for many folks, this will be a longer one, with the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday coming up on Monday. More plans to come.