Getting Started on This Week's Dinners

This week's natural grocery deals are screaming fish and chicken, good stuff. For tonight, with Sprouts and Sunflower warring over haddock prices, and 41/50 count shrimp $3.99/lb at Sunflower, I'm thinking of an adaptation of smoky shrimp and halibut stew from Bon Appetit, using haddock in place of the halibut. It won't hold together as well, but who really cares. Whole Foods has organic red or green lettuce for $1.50 a head for the side salad, and Health Starts Here breads nearly half off at $2.50.

For tomorrow, it will be on to the boneless, skinless chicken breasts that are $1.97/lb for the value pack at Sprouts (family packs $2.99/lb at Sunflower). I'm so tempted to do quick coq au vin, but cooking with bacon two nights in a row, plus a reprise of the stew with bacon later in the week just sounds like an artery-clogger. So we'll be virtuous and go with spicy roast chicken with tomatoes and marjoram from Bon Appetit. Although it calls for bone-in chicken breasts, it lightens up nicely with boneless, skinless ones. My tomatoes are almost always organic, but for this recipe I sort of have an eye on the conventional cherry or grape tomatoes that are $2 for 10 oz containers at Sunflower. Organic russets or yams roasted alongside the chicken will be on the side. Sprouts has 5 pound bags of organic russets for $2.50 (99 cents a pound at Sunflower), while Sunflower has the organic yams at 99 cents a pound.

To round out the weekend, we'll turn back to that shrimp from Sunflower with a recipe I haven't yet tried, linguine with spicy shrimp from Cooking Light. A longtime fave, also from Cooking Light might be an alternative, spicy shrimp with fettuccine, since the two recipes are pretty similar.

And that at least gets us through the weekend, with more planning to do.