Weekday Dinner Ideas

Happy May Day. Tonight's dinner of pasta with peas, asparagus, lettuce, and prosciutto is suitably spring-like, and we'll continue the spring celebration tomorrow with shrimp risotto with baby spinach and basil, another Bon Appetit recipe. The shrimp are on sale at both Sprouts and Sunflower, while my spinach is beautiful stuff bought at yesterday's Boulder Farmer's Market, although it can obviously come from a store, too.

For Tuesday, we always have something big made over the weekend that serves as a quick midweek reheat, and in this case it will be the smoky shrimp and halibut stew. Tuesday will also be the last day of the current Alfalfa's sale, where organic spring mix for the side salad is a stunning $1.99 a pound (and the Pearl Street Whole Foods was matching that the last time I looked).

By Wednesday we'll want something with an Asian flair, and since that will be the last day of Sunflower's 40% off select ground meat sale, I'm thinking of trying something new from the April issue of Bon Appetit, spicy pork with asparagus and chile. Since ground pork isn't part of Sunflower's sale, we'll use ground turkey or chicken instead, and we can catch asparagus for $1.99 a pound at Whole Foods all the way through May 10th. I'd up the sparse number of green onions (in Vietnam, we saw that they were very liberally used, and delicious), and maybe throw in some of my green garlic from the Farmer's Market. We'd normally serve something like this over brown rice, but might use sobas this time for variety (and they're buckwheat, too).

Finally, we'll want something simple and quick for Thursday, and since Wednesday's "pork" dish will be turkey or chicken instead, we'll go with a quick saute of pork chops, which are $2.99 a pound through Wednesday at Sprouts. Since Thursday will be Cinco de Mayo, if I get ambitious I'll do arroz a la Mexicana from the current issue of Saveur. They're not yet sharing that content online, but there are plenty of other recipes for it out there, like this one.

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