Weekend Dinner Ideas

If it's Friday already, it's time to get planning something to eat for the weekend. Since we're looking forward (hoping? praying?) to the possibility of some rain and/or snow over the next couple of days, tonight will be our grilling night. Having picked up a handsome piece of halibut at Whole Foods' one-day sale, that will go on the grill, probably touched only with a bit of olive oil and lemon. (If you missed the Whole Foods sale, both Sprouts and Sunflower are advertising halibut this week for $16.99 a pound; fresh at Sprouts, unspecified in the Sunflower ad.) For a side veggie, I'm inclined to get in one more round of Whole Foods' recipe for Swiss chard gratin before we find ourselves suddenly in the heat of summer, not wanting to heat the oven. The Comte in the sauce has to be one of my favorite cheeses, and you can usually find just the perfectly sized piece in Whole Foods' basket of assorted small cheeses.

For tomorrow, I'm thinking about the $9.99 a pound sea scallops in Sprouts' 72 hour sale that runs from today through Sunday, and since they also have a decent price on raw shrimp, it will be shrimp and scallop posole from Bon Appetit. Sprouts also has organic leaf lettuce for $1.29 a head for the side salad.

Those scallops are still on my mind for Sunday (I previously warned that this was looking like a great week for fish), so I'll do them in a pasta twist on linguine with bay scallops, fennel, and tomatoes from Bon Appetit. With sea scallops at such a reasonable price, why not use them instead of the humbler bay scallop? Sprouts also has organic grape tomatoes at the very good price of $1.99 a pint for this recipe. And while I'm there, I'll definitely pick up some of the boneless center-cut pork loin chops that Sprouts is practically giving away at $1.77 a pound during the 72 hour sale. The chops will appear on the menu later in the week, and they also store quite well securely wrapped in the freezer.

And that gets us through the weekend's dinners.