Getting Started on This Week's Dinners

Sunday's looking like our best grilling day of the weekend, with a better chance of storms tomorrow and Saturday, so this week we'll postpone the grilling a couple of days. That's fine, since there are other things I want to do, starting with another celebration of the arrival of our local corn crop.

Just a week or so ago, I said that I missed our winter habit of doing a big soup or casserole on the weekend that made a quick midweek reprise dinner as well. Thinking about more ways to enjoy our local corn crop, duh, it hit me: corn chowder. There are tons of recipes out there, and one we particularly like is corn and fingerling potato chowder with applewood-smoked bacon from Cooking Light. Corn and a touch of bacon, yum. Seems to me I also have a recipe around that uses smoked salmon for that smoky flavor instead, with better fats. I'll have to find that one for a second chowder round before our corn season is done.

Then, carbing up the family members for an expected long run on the weekend, we'll turn to linguine with bay scallops, fennel, and tomatoes, substituting the big shrimp that are on sale at Sprouts for the scallops. Sunflower has organic hothouse tomatoes for $1.77/lb this week, and if you frequent north Boulder, Lucky's Market has an even more appealing deal, organic on the vine tomatoes for $1.49/lb.

Then we'll finally get to our grilling, opting for the fresh wild salmon that's a fabulous $7.99/lb at both Sprouts and Lucky's this week. With fruit so gorgeous at this time of year, a little fruit salsa will go on the side (a concoction of whatever suits your fancy - mine usually contains fruit of choice, diced avocado, some diced tomato and onion, some parsley or other fresh herb, and splashes of olive oil and lemon juice or vinegar). Potato packages will go on the grill, plus maybe ... corn? I also have a ton of green beans to use from Wednesday's one-day sale at Whole Foods, when they were just 99 cents a pound for organic one.

More thinking to do for the rest of the week.