Weekday Dinner Ideas

If it's Sunday, it's time to get planning the rest of the week's dinners. In addition to our natural grocery store sales, several other factors are motivating my planning this week: the need to keep working on my herb pots, enjoying as much fresh, local corn while we still can, and incorporating some freshly roasted green chiles somewhere. With those factors in mind, let's get going.

We'll want a pasta dish by tomorrow, and I have one in mind that will hit both the herb pots and the corn enjoyment: pasta with corn, zucchini, and tomatoes, from Mark Bittman in the New York Times. As Bittman notes, this is a very flexible recipe, so instead of the tarragon called for, I'll harvest mercilessly from my herb pots, so basil will be the dominant herb. As I've previously noted, my herbs will also go into my homemade buttermilk salad dressing for the side salad. The corn will obviously be fresh from Munson's, and yesterday, I saw organic roma tomatoes for $1.99 a pound at the Pearl Street Whole Foods, a low price for them. (And no, this isn't the same pasta with corn dish I made last week - that one had bacon, while this is purely vegetarian.)

Tuesday is our usual day for a reheat of something big made over the weekend, which this week is the soupe au pistou, with that vitalizing glob of pesto from my basil plants plopped on top.

With that much vegetarian dining, we can hit the red meat by Wednesday. With 100% grass-fed, organic ground beef just $3.99 a pound at Sprouts through then, I'm going to make my own green chile burgers, inspired by the delicious prepared ones I've previously bought at Whole Foods. All you have to do is incorporate some (or lots of) diced roasted green chiles from the Farmers' Market, Sunflower, or Whole Foods into the burgers. Since Whole Foods has some beautiful organic heirloom tomatoes on sale for the quite good price of $3.99 a pound, and they also have whole one pound logs of Crave Brothers fresh mozzarella for an astonishing $5.99 each, that calls for a caprese salad on the side, with more basil from my herb pots. No recipe really is needed for something that simple, but the current issue of Bon Appetit shows you the outine (although using unusual cherry tomatoes) with heirloom tomato caprese.

There should be a fair amount of that pound of Crave Brothers mozzarella left, and since we haven't had a rice-based dish yet this week, I'll take one more whack at my herb pots to invent my own risotto with herbs and mozzarella for Thursday. This goes well with a bit of smoked ham (like Black Forest) added to it as well.

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