Weekday Dinner Ideas

Happy Sunday, time to get going on dinner plans for the rest of the week.

For tomorrow, with Sunflower's 50% off pork extravaganza, I'm thinking about trying another new recipe from the current issue of Cooking Light, chipotle pork tacos. Frequent readers know I love all things chipotle, and you can always have it ready to use by following the tip in this previous post. The magazine recommends accompanying this with a quick, delicious-sounding radish and fennel salad (sliced radishes and fennel combined with some chopped celery and olives, tossed with a lemon-olive oil dressing).

For Tuesday, we always have something available from the weekend's cooking for an easy midweek reheat, and this week, it's the potato and root vegetable chowder with bacon. A side salad, maybe some bakehouse bread, and you're done.

For Wednesday, since rice hasn't appeared in our menus yet this week, we'll go with shrimp risotto with baby spinach and basil from Bon Appetit. The spinach will be the remainder of the big organic bag from the farmers' market, and the shrimp will be from the sales at either Sprouts or Sunflower.

To get us through Thursday, I'm thinking about a quick saute of pork chops finished with a drizzle of balsamic vinegar, no recipe needed. The chops will be bought by the end of the current sales Wednesday, coming from either the Sunflower 50% off sale, or the boneless center cut chops that are $3.99 a pound at Lucky's. Baked yams make a great side, and organic ones are 99 cents a pound through Wednesday at Sprouts.

And that will get us through this week's planning, with it all starting over again on Friday.