Weekday Dinner Ideas

Thinking about the rest of the week's dinners, while I'm in the mood for spring, the weather sounds like it wants to head back towards winter. We'll therefore start the week off tomorrow with our winter-like easy reheat from Friday, the cod, potato, and fennel casserole from Gourmet magazine.

It will be time for a rice dish by Tuesday, and I may be jumping the seasonal gun here, but I'm going to go for sausage risotto with spring greens from Bon Appetit. We'll have more options for the greens a little later in the season, but anything will do in the meantime, including the braising mix that's usually available in the produce department at the Pearl Street Whole Foods. Both Sprouts (parmesan) and Sunflower (basil) have a type of chicken sausage on sale that would be fine for this recipe.

Looking for something super quick for the middle of the week, we'll turn to the chicken breast sale at Sprouts to do an easy saute of boneless, skinless chicken breasts dressed up with a breadcrumb and herb coating. The organic yams also on sale at Sprouts will get roasted on the side, either whole as a type of baked potato, or cut into spears like fries.

To finish off this round of planning, we'll want a pasta dish by Thursday, and I'm thinking of a fun adaptation that will straddle the winter/spring sensibilities. We'll start with a recipe from the New York Times, pasta with winter squash and tomatoes, planting us firmly in the winter camp (Sunflower has organic hothouse tomatoes for $2.99 a pound through Wednesday, and their organic romas are sometimes cheaper). Then we'll spin it towards spring by adding some asparagus pieces to the squash and tomatoes as they cook (asparagus being a $1.77 a pound at Sunflower through Wednesday, but somebody always seems to have a good price these days).

And that will get us through to next Friday's planning.