Weekday Dinner Ideas

Happy Daylight Savings time, and my what a glorious nearly spring weekend it is in Boulder. No time to linger over something like dinner planning, so this will be quick. For tomorrow, Sprouts has 41/50 size raw shrimp (small, but good for this purpose) for $3.97 a pound, so I'm thinking our first rice dish of the week will be butternut squash risotto with shrimp from Bon Appetit. Sure, the temperature may hit 70 tomorrow, but it's not even mid-March yet, so we're still in winter squash mode. We have a ways to go before we start thinking about things like pea shoots.

Tuesday is our usual reheat of something big made over the weekend, which this week is the cod chowder with saffron and fingerling potatoes, also from Bon Appetit. All I have to do is make a salad and defrost some Whole Foods Bakehouse bread that's in my freezer.

We'll be looking for a pasta dish by Wednesday, and with chicken sausage on sale at both Sprouts and Sunflower through that day, it will be an easy improv of chicken sausage sauteed with onion, garlic, bell peppers, a few mushrooms, and some good quality jarred pasta sauce, served over the pasta of choice. Both Sprouts and Sunflower have excellent prices through Wednesday on the organic lettuce for the side salad, leaf lettuce at Sprouts, romaine at Sunflower.

Something with an Asian spin will need to be on deck by Thursday, so I'll have some of Sprouts' $3.99 beef stew beef laid in by the end of the sale Wednesday for sirloin and vegetable stir-fry from Cooking Light. I find using the nice, lean stew beef available at both Sprouts and Sunflower beats cutting up a steak any day, and usually at a better price. Sprouts also has organic broccoli for just 99 cents a pound through Wednesday.

Which gets us through to Friday's planning. Enjoy the rest of this lovely weekend!