Weekday Dinner Ideas

Yet again, sort of. Good cold, rainy, and already a little snowy morning Boulder. I hope anything you've planted so far this spring is of the type that can take the heavy, wet snow that's expected through tomorrow morning. My fear is for the trees, with most of their leaves already out. At least if the tree carnage proves to be too much to haul away, our neighbor has already offered to host a bonfire.

As for dinners, making a major assumption the power stays on, I thought I had everything planned out for a delicious pasta dish for tomorrow, strisce alla chiantigiana from Bon Appetit. When a recipe calls for anything more than a splash of cooking wine, my feeling is that it should come from a bottle that you'd also be willing to drink, albeit a pretty inexpensive one since complexity would be a waste. With coq au vin on the menu last night, I thought I had it all figured out to split a decent cooking wine between the two recipes. However, when husband was directed to pick up a bottle of wine for cooking, what came into the house was far more appropriate for drinking, so after the allotted amount was measured into the coq last night, the remainder went into glasses, leaving me with the question of whether to trundle back out in the rain/snow to get another bottle of a cheap cooking type. Basic spaghetti with sausage and peppers is a backup plan.

Tuesday will be our reheat of something big made over the weekend, and this week we'll have our choice of two options, either last night's quick coq au vin from Bon Appetit, or tonight's kale and white bean stew from Food and Wine magazine. Given the weather, I'm so glad I opted to go with wintery comfort foods right now, although our side salads have lots of spring greens and pea shoots from yesterday's Farmers' Market.

In the sales running through Wednesday, high end burger seems to be prominent, with grass-fed organic ground beef $4.99 a pound at Sprouts and Teton Waters Ranch grass-fed ground chuck also $4.99 a pound at the Lucky's Market in Longmont (sorry, no time to check the Boulder Lucky's). Since the Longmont Lucky's is also advertising organic green beans at $1.98 a pound, that got me thinking of a recipe that doesn't have a link, burger and green beans from Jane Brody's Good Food Cookbook. Here's what I've said about it previously: ...we'll do a standby from a classic cookbook, Jane Brody's Good Food Book. Simply called ground beef and green beans, it's basically a stir fry of burger and green beans with some garlic, ginger, and red pepper flakes, sauced with a bit of soy sauce, broth, and cornstarch, the whole thing served over rice.   

And for Thursday? I just don't know yet! Maybe simple sauteed chicken breasts from the Longmont Lucky's $1.98 a pound sale through Wednesday, or the usual fallback, salmon burgers from Whole Foods. We just need to get through the rest of this weekend first.