Weekday Dinner Ideas

With such enticing sales this week at Whole Foods (through Tuesday) and the new Lucky's Market (through Wednesday), it's hard to know where to begin in choosing what to make this week.  But being late August, I think those organic on-the-vine cluster tomatoes at 99 cents a pound and local sweet corn ten ears for $1 at the new Lucky's will have to play a major role.

Whole Foods has four in-house brined meats in their current sale, and the brined chicken we put on the grill last weekend was truly the best ever.  That means that for tomorrow, we'll have to try the brined pork chop griller at $4.99 a pound before the sale goes away ($2 more per pound after).  Interesting that the sale flyer specifically says boneless, while the ones I saw in the case a couple of days ago were bone-in.  We'll see.  If we wanted to go cheaper, the grass-fed ground beef at Lucky's with its "never ever" high quality standards for just $1.99 a pound in the current sale would make a terrific burger.  And with the sweet corn and organic tomato specials mentioned above at the new Lucky's, plus organic butter lettuce just 99 cents a head, that just screams to do tomato and corn salad with marjoram from Bon Appetit.  Since I dislike feta, fresh mozzarella does well, and skipping the cheese altogether also works.

Tuesday will be our reheat of something big made over the weekend, which this week is tonight's bay scallop riff on corn and cod chowder from Food and Wine magazine, using the sale scallops at the new Lucky's instead of cod.

We'll want pasta by Wednesday, so I'm thinking of one I'd wanted to do earlier in the season, but something came up and plans were pushed aside.  So it will be pasta with corn, zucchini and tomatoes from the New York Times.  As Bittman notes, you can do really anything you want with this flexible summer recipe.  I like using lots of fresh basil ribbons from my flourishing plants, or putting a southwestern spin on it with cilantro and a bit of chili powder.

Once again, I haven't figured out Thursday, perhaps because we'll have new sales by then, and the current batch is so enticing, I can't wait to see what's next.  Although at some point, the brouhaha over Lucky's grand opening will have to die down to a more mundane sale pace.