The Rest of This Week's Dinner Ideas

Had best get going on the modest planning for easy dinners to take us from tomorrow through Thursday. Since tomorrow's the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, it's an opportunity to either extend the weekend-type cooking through a Monday, or go the easier route to enjoy the time off. I'll take the latter option, and stick with weekday cooking. This is a week that calls for some sort of burger on the plate, with ground chicken or turkey $1.97/lb at Sunflower. Since they're in patty form, I'd also include the Maryland style blue crab cakes that are on sale at Whole Foods for $9.99/lb and worth every penny. So we'll go with crab cakes with some simple herbed rice on the side (this recipe in Bon Appetit is from Boulder's own Happy Noodle restaurant), and sauteed organic kale, which is $1.50 a bunch this week at Whole Foods.

Then of course we have our reprise from the weekend dinner, in Tuesday's case, a reheat of the New England seafood chowder, which turned out really well. The big side salad will use organic leaf lettuce that's $1.50 a bunch this week at Whole Foods.

Then, with asparagus $1.97/lb through Wednesday at Sunflower ($2.99/lb at Sprouts) and organic broccoli just 99 cents/lb at Sprouts (also through Wednesday), that practically screams to do chicken, asparagus, and broccoli stir-fry from epicurious.com (and created by a dude living in Carbondale no less). It will be served over rice, and I'm betting that when I finally get to Sprouts, bags of Lundberg's wonderful rice will be part of their 25% off gluten-free products sale.

Finally, there's been a family request for pork chops, which are easy enough. It's not the best week for sale prices on them ($4.99/lb being advertised by Sunflower for boneless loin chops), but that's okay. We might dress them up with a tomatillo and green apple sauce (organic Granny Smiths are 99 cents/lb at Sunflower). A simple microwaved "baked" potato will go on the side, along with either more asparagus captured during Sunflower's sale, or maybe the $1.50 kale from Whole Foods.

And that will get us through the rest of the week until Friday's planning starts all over again.