Weekend Dinner Ideas

It's Friday already, so time to get the weekend dinner ideas together, starting with tonight. Even though it's starting to warm up out there, with snow on the ground, chilly temperatures, and boneless skinless chicken breasts just $1.97 a pound at Sprouts, I'll warm the house up tonight with comfy quick coq au vin from Bon Appetit. Sprouts also has packages of bacon that promise to be nitrate-free on sale, but this household prefers to buy a few single slices instead. And of course there's a good supply of chicken broth and cooking stock in the kitchen from the sales currently happening on Imagine organic broth and stock at Vitamin Cottage (through tomorrow there) and Whole Foods (through Tuesday).

After our brush with winter this week, since it's supposed to reach the 60s tomorrow and Sunday, I'll go out on a limb and plan for one last weekend of grilling, although it pretty much happens in the dark at this time of year. One last round of grilled salmon sounds great, and I have a beautiful piece to come out of my freezer from that great one-day sale Whole Foods did a few weeks ago. If you aren't so lucky, Sprouts has fresh wild caught Pacific salmon for $5.99 a pound, and Sunflower is advertising wild caught sockeye for $9.99 a pound. To complement all those good omega-3s in the fish, we'll do grilled vitamin-rich yam spears, and Sprouts has organic yams for $1.49 a pound.

After tomorrow's healthy dinner, we'll bend a bit on Sunday by grilling or smoking the boneless country-style ribs on sale at Sprouts for $1.97 a pound. To healthy it up, we could roast some handsome winter squash on the side, and organic hard squash is a good price just about everywhere at this time of year. Since Full Circle Farm was still roasting their wonderful chiles at last Saturday's Boulder Farmers Market, and I have a freezer full of them too, I'm also thinking about creamy stovetop corn with poblano chiles from the New York Times, although, sniff, it would be the first time this fall that I'll have to pull a bag of corn from the freezer to do it.

And that will get us through the weekend's dinners. Enjoy the warm up!