Weekend Dinner Ideas, Sort Of

With my fridge brimming with fresh produce from yesterday's Red Wagon Organic Farm CSA open house (see the post just below), this is my first and possibly last post about how I plan to work with all these veggies. The conflict between my tendency to plan ahead and the need to go with the flow of veggies that arrive will probably be much too embarrassing to share in public. But at least for this weekend, here goes.

I actually found no conflict whatsoever for tonight's dinner. I recently had the chance to gorge on the freshest fish, richest dairy, and organic veggies imaginable, and bringing those trends into home cooking works for tonight. The fresh Icelandic cod on sale at Whole Foods for $12.99 a pound had already caught my eye, and since I'm now into the simplest preparations to not mess with the fish, it will be a simple saute of that. Organic Yukon potatoes will get mashed for a side, although back to one percent milk and Earth Balance for mashing instead of the rich butter and/or cream I indulged in for a few days. As for the abundance of veggies from Red Wagon, the fish can go on a lightly dressed bed of arugula, while most of that gorgeous spinach can get sauteed with a couple of Egyptian walking onions and a bit of crushed pepper for the side.

Tomorrow's a different story. With a nice top round steak on sale at Whole Foods for $4.49 a pound, I'd been thinking about an Asian dinner involving two recipes I've mentioned a year or so ago, a soy and ginger beef for the grill, and soba noodles with pea shoots to incorporate our short pea shoot season. But pea shoots weren't among the items we could get at Red Wagon yesterday (first experience of planning ahead for something that won't be part of the CSA delivery, plus we novices were way too clumsy to have been allowed anywhere near those pea shoots!). I could go to the Farmers' Market for them tomorrow, but with a fridge full of beautiful veggies already, that doesn't sound like the best use of time. Being already in a beef frame of mind despite resolutions to get back on a holy cholesterol track, and discovering that the Lucky's Market in Longmont has boneless ribeyes for $7.99 a pound this week, we're diverting to a plain old grilling event for tomorrow. The new crop of sweet corn arriving from out of state (five for $1 for white corn at Sprouts, four for $1 for bi-color corn at the Lucky's in Longmont today, even though their ad says it's two for $1) will go on the side.

Those corn specials will drive Sunday's thinking, and even though I did it just a few weeks ago when fresh corn first appeared this year, we're ready for another round of corn and green chile chowder from the Food Network. The side salad will be a great place to use up any remaining arugula, spinach, and radishes from the Red Wagon bonanza.

Temps heading into the 80s this weekend!