Weekday Dinner Ideas

Sunday means time to start thinking about what dinner will be for the rest of the week. I have polenta on the brain, and since Sunflower has the lowest price I've ever seen on their fresh chicken sausage at $1.97 a pound, that spells another longtime favorite, sausage and peppers with polenta. I just wing it, sauteing the sausage with some onion and bell peppers, then mixing in a touch of good quality pasta sauce. For a formal recipe, mushroom and sausage ragu with polenta from Cooking Light is a good one, and Saveur magazine recently covered the Italian-American background of sausages and peppers, with a recipe too.

Tuesday is our usual reheat of something big made over the weekend, and this week we actually have two choices. Since we'll be having polenta tomorrow evening, the dinner reheat will probably be the escarole soup from Saveur, but there's also the possibility of the beef goulash with polenta from the Whole Foods recipe.

We'll want some pasta by Wednesday, and Sprouts' $4.99 a pound sale on fresh farmed salmon through that day is making me think of a recipe I haven't made in ages from a beloved Chez Panisse cookbook. Coming from an old cookbook, it isn't originally online, but it has been picked up by an adapter as salmon and roasted red pepper fettuccine. The roasted red peppers will for sure come from the Whole Foods olive bar, or even from a jar. No need to go to all that roasting trouble, especially on a weeknight.

To round things out for Thursday, with the ground turkey, chicken, and grass fed ground beef all at good prices through Wednesday at Sunflower, we'll return to what has become a spectacularly successful recipe in this house, Thai beef cabbage cups from Cooking Light. I like to wrap the meat mixture in organic lettuce leaves instead, but some day should give the cabbage a try, too.

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