Weekday Dinner Ideas

Good cold and very white morning, Boulder. Happy Super Bowl today and also happy Groundhog Day. Punxsatawney Phil predicted six more weeks of winter this morning, but at the rate we're going, we may be condensing them all into one. At least we get a one day break from the snow today, then have snow in the forecast for the next five days in a row, with highs for Wednesday only expected in single digits. At this rate, we should join our New York and New Jersey Super Bowl friends for better weather.

Getting back to what to eat for the rest of the week after consuming multitudes of chicken wings (see a few posts below for Whole Foods' fantastic weekend-only sale on them) and chili today, my primary motivation will be avoiding leftovers, as I already have a fridge full of them. Tomorrow we'll therefore set a different tone from today by doing swordfish steaks, since I've discovered Whole Foods, at least at the Pearl Street store, reliably has nice Canadian ones in their seafood freezer case for a quite reasonable price of about $10 a pound (and we'll only eat swordfish that comes from either the US or Canada). Some of that asparagus that's just $1.48 a pound at Sprouts through Wednesday will go on the side, either steamed or roasted.

Tuesday is dine out for Greenwood Wildlife day (see the post just below this for details), with a number of local restaurants offering support for Greenwood's wonderful efforts saving injured and orphaned wildlife by donating a portion of their proceeds that day. Not getting out much (a casualty of liking to cook at home), we'll try the Papa Murphy's take and bake pizza option, allowing us to stay at home for dinner while also almost giving the cook a night off. If the roads remain snowy, that's a good thing too.

Wednesday will be our usual reheat of something big made over the weekend, which this week is tonight's black bean chili with butternut squash and Swiss chard from Bon Appetit.

Thursday's still a bit up in the air, but not having had rice or something Asian so far for the week, I'm thinking about a very simple recipe for a pork and asparagus stir-fry from Mark Bittman's Best Recipes in the World cookbook, grabbing more of that sale asparagus at Sprouts by Wednesday. The cookbook recipe calls for diced pork, but he also published a fairly similar recipe in the New York Times as stir-fried asparagus with pork, which calls for ground pork instead.

At which point it should still be snowing and we all should be about ready to scream. At least we'll have a day off from more snow coming down today, and it seems the whole state will be screaming for the Broncos.

P.S. It just started snowing again at a bit before 9 this morning, at least at my house. So much for a day without snow.