Friday, February 11, 2011

Getting Started on This Week's Dinners

All eyes may be on Valentine's Day Monday, but we still need to eat across the weekend, starting with tonight. Shrimp is on my mind, having scored big at Whole Foods' one-day sale two days ago, and Sprouts also has wild caught jumbo raw shrimp on sale this week ($8.99 a pound for the 21-25 count ones). I'm therefore going to try something new to me from Food & Wine magazine, smoky shrimp and grits. It's nice that the recipe has been lightened from the classic Southern style by cutting back on the cheese and adding spinach. Grits are so easy to cook too; if the name doesn't sound classy enough for you, call it polenta. I want to do something with the organic cauliflower that's 99 cents a pound at Sunflower for the side, so it will probably roast in the oven, possibly as roasted cauliflower with dates and pine nuts from the Food Network.

It will then be time for something involving pasta, something vegetarian, and something celebrating our winter veggies, so we'll turn to pappardelle with squash, mushrooms, and spinach from Bon Appetit. Peeled winter squash is one of the few veggies I'm willing to eat in a conventional version, and Sprouts has acorn, butternut, and spaghetti squash for 69 cents a pound this week.

To finish off the weekend, we still need our big pot of something to reheat for a quick midweek dinner, and this week's sales are calling for an old favorite, smoky shrimp and halibut stew. See the note above regarding the shrimp, and with sustainably sourced halibut nearly the price of gold, cod that's on sale at both Sprouts and Sunflower this week makes a perfectly reasonable and delicious substitute. Add a salad on the side, and a beautiful loaf of WFM seeded wholegrain bread, on sale at Whole Foods for $2.79 a loaf, and you're set.

And that will do us for the weekend. Valentine's Day preview coming shortly, or at least before Sunday's weekday dinners post.

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