Weekday Dinner Ideas

Good, hot Sunday morning, Boulder.  Good grief.  So Denver hit a record high of 104 yesterday, with today predicted at 101, tomorrow 100, and back to 101 on Tuesday.  This is not the time for serious cooking.  But I think I've devised a plan that will get us through this heat and still eating well, without resorting to takeout or dining out.  Tonight's dinner as previously mentioned will be done completely outside on the grill.  Heading into our weekday dinners tomorrow, I'm going to try an experiment.  While I'll gladly sample products at our local stores, I'm rarely tempted to buy them, but there was a notable exception a few days ago at Whole Foods.  A vendor was sampling Qrunch burgers, a quinoa-based veggie burger that blew me away with its deliciousness, a total surprise.  I tried the spicy Italian version (it also comes in mild, which I haven't tried), and immediately picked up a package.  So for tomorrow, we'll keep the cooking to an absolute minimum by having these Qrunch burgers, probably on toast, since we're not into big buns, with lots of salad on the side.  All it will take is a quick heating of the burgers in a pan, and the directions say they can even be heated in a toaster.  That's minimal.

Tuesday is our usual reheat of something big made over the weekend, which this week is our extra large batch of grilled chicken and ratatouille from Bon Appetit.  No cooking needed aside from a quick reheat of the chicken in the microwave.

Which means we've postponed any real cooking until Wednesday, which I also see as low key.  Wanting a pasta dish by then, we'll do a simple sauce involving chicken sausage (Italian ones $2.99 a pound at Sprouts through Wednesday), onions, bell peppers, and maybe mushrooms, with some good quality jarred pasta sauce, no recipe required.  For the recipe-inclined, a nice one is the sauce that goes with mushroom and sausage ragu with polenta from Cooking Light.

We'll keep Thursday minimal again, improvising a rice dish by adding whatever seasonal spring veggies appeal at Wednesday's Farmers' Market or at the Cure Organic Farm store, and finishing it off by melting in some fresh mozzerella, which Sprouts has at $2.99 for eight ounces through Wednesday (and $3.50 at Sunflower).  My herb pots are already yielding enough parsley, oregano, chives, basil, and the like that I'm starting to harvest a bit for dishes like this, too.

Which gets us through to Friday's planning with a simple plan for a very, very hot week.  Stay cool out there.