Friday, January 31, 2014

Weekend Dinner Ideas

Hope you're enjoying another snowy day in Boulder. At this rate, we'd do better joining our friends in Manhattan and New Jersey for the Super Bowl just for the weather. In any case, here's a quick rundown of plans for the weekend.

With an infinite number of dinner options, I look toward natural sales as a way to channel all those possibilities into some concrete ideas, and that worked splendidly for tonight. Looking at Sprouts' current sales on asparagus for $1.48 a pound and medium-sized sea scallops for $6.99 a pound, I hit upon three-green pasta with scallops and pesto sauce from Bon Appetit. The pesto is also an advantageous element since I have plenty in my freezer from last summer's basil bounty, it was just about half price at Whole Foods two days ago, and is on the olive bar at the Whole Foods on Pearl Street, where it's $6.99 a pound every Thursday, a steal.

We'll start cranking up the Super Bowl mood tomorrow with a main course spin on chicken wings, made a bit healthier by using boneless skinless chicken breasts, value packs of which are $1.99 a pound this week at Sprouts. It's buffalo chicken "fries," which I saw in a magazine I've subsequently lost but has been replicated at that link, and you can lower the cholesterol further by using something like Earth Balance instead of the butter called for in the dipping sauce. Regular chicken wings probably have the highest skin to meat ratio of any chicken cut, so this recipe practically looks like health food instead.

For Super Bowl Sunday proper, we have a tradition of going for our favorite vegetarian chili, black bean and butternut squash chili with Swiss chard, accompanied by green onion corn bread, both from Bon Appetit. The chili won't really be vegetarian, since I'll use Imagine's wonderful organic low-sodium chicken broth in it, but at least the menu will be a foil to the bucket of chicken wings from Whole Foods that we'll be devouring (weekend sale price noted a few posts below).

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