Weekday Dinner Ideas

It's crunch time, the week before Christmas, so this will be quick. Today is the last day of Sprouts' special 72 hour sale, and I'm going to grab some of those gigantic 16/20 count raw shrimp they have at $6.99 a pound in order to do another risotto tomorrow. I'm burned out on risotto with butternut squash, so I'll hit the freezer to do something different, shrimp risotto with peas, a "Recipe for Health" from the New York Times. I might hybridize it by adding some baby organic spinach, a spin on another favorite recipe.

Tuesday will be our customary reheat of something big made over the weekend, which in this case is the potato and root vegetable chowder with bacon from Bon Appetit. It will be accompanied by another wonderful fresh baguette for only $1.50 from Whole Foods, plus a salad, of course.

By Wednesday, I'm thinking that a pizza will sound great. When you make it using the fresh dough from Whole Foods to fill a cookie sheet, it makes a ton of pizza, and the leftovers will be handy to have around for lunches and snacks for drop-in friends before the holidays. Cooking Light has some great ideas for ways to top that dough (adjusting of course for the large size of the dough base), and this time I might try the pepperoni, onion, and olive pizza, if I can tear myself away from my favorite pizza Margherita.

We can't have a week without pasta, so we'll return to seasonality for Thursday with pasta with butternut squash and rosemary from Bon Appetit. This is another recipe that fares well with a large handful of baby organic spinach added to the sauce to wilt at the end. Sunflower has organic butternut for 99 cents a pound through Wednesday, and their price on bulk organic spinach is low all the time. For the prosciutto, I favor the pieces Whole Foods sells for considerably less than the kind that's super-thinly sliced in from of you, since it's going into a sauce, not being wrapped around an asparagus spear.

And that will get us to Friday's planning, dangerously close to Christmas Eve!