Weekend Dinner Ideas

Getting started on dinner plans, it didn't take much thought to know what will be on tonight's table; with today's one-day sale on Whole Foods' fine organic whole chickens, it will be a simple roast chicken. I'll just roast a pan of sliced winter veggies along with it, including parsnips, yams, red onion wedges, and acorn squash slivers, and dinner will be a feast. If you'd prefer to get fancier, the Whole Foods blog includes recipe suggestions to go along with the sale.

While on a comfort food roll, I'm going to go out on a limb tomorrow and attempt a pasta dish that is so simple, it can probably only be successfully pulled off in the hands of a master, which I certainly am not. The dish is called bavette cacio e pepe (bavette with cheese and pepper), and hails from Mario Batali's magnificent NYC restaurant, Lupa. Although it was some time ago that I had it there, I could swear the pasta was wider than a linguine shape. In any case, the Pearl Street Whole Foods carries cacio di Roma in its cheese department, and since I'll be there for the chicken sale, I'll take the plunge, get the cheese, and try this recipe too. When a recipe consists basically of pasta, cheese, and ground pepper, I just know I'll blow it with too much pasta water, overcooked pasta, and who knows what else. But if you ever have a chance to try it as done by the masters at Lupa, you just might have a pasta epiphany.

For Sunday, we'll return to the comfortable world of fool-proof cooking with a stew, and the sales on shrimp at Sunflower and haddock at Sprouts are suggesting my spin on smoky shrimp and halibut stew from Bon Appetit. I find haddock or cod substitutes perfectly well in this, and that using halibut in such a stew is a waste of a pricey fish. With a salad and a loaf of fresh bread on the side, a good dinner is guaranteed, as we'll probably be attempting to forget the disaster that tomorrow night's pasta experiment will be.

Which will get us through to the weekday dinner planning.