Weekday Dinner Ideas

Happy game day everybody, but the rest of the week still requires attention. Since we're staying pretty healthy today with a vegetarian chili, for tomorrow we can indulge in Whole Foods' cinque formaggio pizza, currently on sale for $7.99 for a large one. This sale theoretically goes through the 15th, per the sales flyer, but the last time Whole Foods said they were doing a three week sale, they in fact replaced it after their usual two weeks. I'm therefore taking no chances; I'm getting my cinque formaggio pizza now! It's great embellished with some Yves veggie pepperoni, currently also on sale at Whole Foods (Pearl Street and probably elsewhere) for $2.50, plus mushrooms or whatever other veggie appeals.

Then of course we'll have an easy reheat dinner, and this week, there are two to choose from, Saturday's lentil soup with spicy Italian sausage or tonight's vegetarian chili. A big side salad, and cornbread leftover from tonight, and we're done.

With ground turkey 40% off at Sunflower through Wednesday, our experiment for the week will be a Lao dish (evidently it's no longer Laoatian, it's Lao), ground turkey laap from the current issue of Food and Wine magazine. I'm sure this is at least the second, if not the third, laap recipe I've encountered in the past couple of months, so laap seems to be a culinary rising star. Think I'd skip the first step of toasting and grinding one tablespoon of rice though - I can't imagine it would add enough flavor to justify the effort, especially in the middle of the week. Using lettuce or endive to roll up the laap is a great idea, and a little brown rice on the side would also be good.

Following Wednesday's experiment, we'll finish off the current planning with a simple standby, spaghetti with sausage, onions, and peppers, using the chicken sausage on sale at both Sunflower ($1.99 a pound) and Sprouts ($2.99 a pound) through Wednesday. Using bottle pasta sauce, this doesn't get any easier. Also, yesterday, Sunflower had excellent manager's specials on both Muir Glen organic pasta sauce for $2.99 a jar and Luigi Vitello organic whole wheat (or white) pasta for 99 cents a one pound package, although you can never tell how long a manager's special will hang in there. Regardless, it's a cheap and easy dinner.

And that gets us through to next Friday's planning. Happy game day, and enjoy our several days of snow.