Weekday Dinner Ideas

If it's Sunday, it's time to get planning again. For tomorrow night, I'm looking for a pasta dish, and something vegetarian would be a nice change, so with organic romas a fantastic mid-winter price of $1.49 a pound at Whole Foods, we'll go with pasta with winter squash and tomatoes from the New York Times. The organic butternut squash for it will come from Sprouts, where it's 99 cents a pound.

For Tuesday, it will be time to reheat the big pot of something made over the weekend, this time being the Mexican chicken soup, a big salad on the side (with more of those organic romas from the Whole Foods sale).

Moving on to something based on rice, I'm looking at the $2.99 a pound chicken sausage sales at Sprouts (apple or basil) and Sunflower (all varieties), and am thinking about sausage and lentils with spinach from Bon Appetit, served over brown rice. The chicken sausage needs to the thoroughly cooked of course, since it isn't a precooked variety, but that only takes a few minutes more.

To get us through Thursday, we'll do sirloin and vegetable stir-fry from Cooking Light, catching the the beef stir fry on sale at Sunflower (or the beef stew meat at Sprouts, a perfectly good substitute) and the organic broccoli on sale at Sprouts by the time those sales end Wednesday. The beef really can be bought any time, popped in the freezer, then taken out when you're ready for it, and broccoli has a pretty nice shelf life, as veggies go. I'd normally serve this over rice, but since that will have been on deck the day before, this will go over soba noodles, which cook in a flash and are whole grain, to boot.

And that will get us through to next Friday's planning.