Weekday Dinner Ideas

I'm a little gun shy about writing extensively about dinner ideas for the rest of this week, after Blogger went down on Friday and lost my post regarding weekend plans when it came back up. But that had never happened before, and hopefully won't happen again, so here goes.

For tomorrow, after tonight's indulgence in beautiful NY strip steaks from Alfalfa's, we'll want to compensate by going vegetarian. Pasta sounds good, so we'll go with whole wheat pasta with edamame, arugula, and herbs from Cooking Light. I picked up a bag of the most fantastic, spicy, organic arugula at yesterday's Farmers' Market from Isabelle Farm, but arugula is certainly available from our stores as well. Edamame are a freezer staple around here, and Whole Foods' own brand is a reliably good deal (and you can get it in organic for just about 20 cents more a bag than the non-organic). Whole Foods also has a great price on organic grape tomatoes this week, $2.50 for a pint. I'll save a bit of that arugula to add to the side salad as well (the heads of lettuce that are on sale at Alfalfa's for $1.50 each were quite handsome yesterday).

For Tuesday, we always have an easy reheat of something big made over the weekend, and this week it will be the summer squash and corn chowder, with another salad and some fresh bread on the side.

On to Wednesday, with boneless skinless chicken breasts $1.99 a pound for the family pack at Sunflower through that day, I picked up extra greens at the Farmers' Market to do spicy stir fried chicken with greens and peanuts from Bon Appetit, which will go over brown rice. The greens may be fresher and more fun coming from the Farmers' Market, but you can obviously also get them anywhere.

For Thursday, I'm inclined to do baked potatoes with spiced beef chili from Bon Appetit. Burger is never expensive, and I also like making this with stew beef, which is on sale through Wednesday at Sprouts. For the potatoes, I was happy to see yesterday that the everyday price for beautiful organic russet bakers at Alfalfa's was only 69 cents a pound, wow.

And that will get us through to next Friday's planning. Now let's hope the Blogger software doesn't blow up and lose this one.