Weekday Dinner Ideas

Good cold and snowy morning, Boulder.  Our 10.7 inches of snow yesterday evidently set a record for January 4th, and a little more is expected through this afternoon, so we're starting to rival my socked in friends and relatives on the East Coast.

As for dinner plans, something always needs to motivate my thinking process.  Usually I turn to our natural grocery sales to inspire ideas, although for this past weekend, efficiency of shopping and cooking played a greater role.  For the remainder of the week, the inspiration will come from trying new recipes, as I spent some recent holiday time organizing a backlog of them from my favorite cooking magazines.

Although the recipe is new to me, tomorrow's dinner is yet another spin on the Thai dish known as laab, larb, or laap, spicy pork lettuce cups from Cooking Light.  Rather than making it with pork, I think I'll try it with the ground chicken breast or turkey breast that Sprouts has for $3.99 a pound through Wednesday ($5.99 a pound sale on ground turkey breast at Whole Foods).  I love the many variations on this Thai dish that have been appearing recently, but they are nearly impossible to search since they never include the original names of the dish.

Tuesday will be our customary reheat of something big made over the weekend, which will be tonight's rice, corn and cheese casserole from Jane Brody's Good Food Book.  That book is too old to originally be on the web, but the recipe has been super popular, and replications of it are easily found by Googling it.  I like to spice it up by adding some diced roasted green chiles from last fall's roasting season that are stashed in my freezer.

Wednesday will be another new recipe from my day of organizing, pappardelle with arugula and prosciutto from Bon Appetit.  Since pappardelle is nearly always an egg-based pasta with a surprising cholesterol wallop, I'll stick with either fettuccine or the yolkless wide noodles that can be found at both Whole Foods and Lucky's.

I'll be tired of cooking by Thursday so that will be something quick, either the boneless pork loin chops Sprouts has for $2.99 a pound through Wednesday, or the boneless skinless chicken breasts the new Lucky's Market in Longmont has for an astonishing $1.58 a pound also through Wednesday (with Lucky's fine "never ever" standards).  Either could benefit from the very quick mushroom sauce from Cooking Light that I've mentioned frequently here.

And that will get us through a week of roller coaster temperatures, absolutely frigid today and subzero tonight, with 50 by Tuesday.  Crazy.