Weekday Dinner Ideas

Another good cold, slightly snowy morning, Boulder. Time to think about food for the rest of the week. Trying to come up with dinner ideas, I've been focusing on three things that particularly appeal in this week's sale: the organic roma tomatoes that are so very low at 98 cents a pound at Sprouts, the organic eggplant that's $1.50 each also at Sprouts, just because it's been so long since we've had eggplant, and boneless skinless chicken breasts $1.99 a pound at Sprouts, but I'll head to the Lucky's Market in Longmont where they are also $1.99 a pound through Wednesday, remarkable considering Lucky's "never ever" standards, including testing to ensure their meats are antibiotic-free. Some of those chicken breasts will also go in the freezer.

Given those three considerations, we'll turn to an eggplant pasta dish I haven't made in a long time for tomorrow, brown rice penne with eggplant from Cooking Light. This obviously could be made with any pasta of choice, although I happen to have some rice penne available. It's kind of like a quick ratatouille on pasta, and it uses jarred pasta sauce (glad they recommend Muir Glen, one of my favorites for everyday use). Plenty of those organic romas will go in the side salad, since I don't even have to bother with them for the pasta.

Tuesday will be something with an Asian spin, turning to those boneless skinless chicken breasts for that. I could drag out a recipe like Kung Pao chicken from Epicurious, but more likely we'll make it really easy with a defrosted bag of stir-fry veggies with edamame, enhanced with some fresh ginger, organic broccoli from Whole Foods' Baseline reopening sale (99 cents a pound through Tuesday), and lots of fresh scallions.

For our usual reheat of something big made over the weekend, this week will be the shrimp and scallop posole from Bon Appetit. Again, lots of those 98 cent a pound organic romas on the side salad.

To keep Thursday simple, we'll probably saute more of those boneless skinless chicken breasts, maybe with Cooking Light's quick mushroom sauce I've mentioned before. Microwaved "baked" potatoes and steamed organic broccoli from that Baseline Whole Foods sale (through Tuesday) will easily round things out.

Which gets us through a pretty easy week.