Weekday Dinner Ideas

On another record breaking high temperature day here in Boulder, it's time to get going on dinner ideas for the rest of the week. With tomorrow being the end of the Final Four, we could possibly just kick back with the big wing deal that Whole Foods is running through the 3rd: a 2.5 pound bucket of ready-to-eat chicken wings accompanied by 16 ounces of ranch dressing and a 22 ounce celery and carrot pack, all for $14.99. More likely we'll cook a real dinner, maybe a fun skillet supper like fingerling potato-leek hash with Swiss chard and eggs from Cooking Light. Sunflower has organic chard on sale for $1.50 a bunch through Wednesday, and if toast is going on the side, they also have my favorite Ezekiel bread at the excellent price of $2.99 for a loaf.

Tuesday is our usual easy reheat of something big made over the weekend, which this week is last night's chipotle beef stew from Gourmet magazine. All I'll have to do is make a side salad and set out some wheat tortillas.

We'll want a pasta dish by Wednesday, and something vegetarian sounds good. I'm torn between two iterations of the same taste: whether to go with Cooking Light's deliciously lightened version of fettuccine Alfredo, or to go all out with Mario Batali's decadently rich bavette cacio e pepe, bavette with cheese and pepper from his outstanding NYC restaurant, Lupa. Whole Foods does carry the cacio di Roma, at least at the Pearl Street store, if I decide to go the more decadent route.

Finally for Thursday, we'll be looking for a rice dish, since one has yet to appear this week. As we near our first Boulder Farmers' Market of the spring coming up this Saturday, it seems appropriate to do one final reliance on the bounty of the freezer to do shrimp and corn pilaf from Bon Appetit. It seems there's always a good price somewhere on frozen shrimp (Sunflower has 41/50 count for $3.99 a pound through Wednesday and Sprouts has 16/20 count for $6.99 a pound through then), and my freezer is still stocked with the fine guys I picked up at Whole Foods' one-day sale a week or so ago.

Which gets us through to next weekend's planning, involving both our first farmers' market of the year, and Easter. Happy April 1st today, no joke.