Weekday Dinner Ideas

Getting ready for a potentially rainy Father's Day afternoon? Then it must be time to think about the rest of the week's dinners, too. For tomorrow, I'm going to go with shrimp risotto with baby spinach and basil from Bon Appetit. My huge basil plant from Whole Foods will benefit from the trimming, and since pea shoots were back at Cure Organic Farm's store yesterday (yahoo, although they're getting a little tougher as the season progresses and need to be edited more), I'll add some pea shoots in with the spinach to make a nicely seasonal dish.

For Tuesday, our big weekend dish to be a quick midweek reheat this time is the baked rigatoni with ricotta and collard greens, except I made it even better by using fresh organic braising mix and pea shoots (of course!) instead of the collards.

We'll also want something quick for Wednesday, and the ground pork sale at Sunflower has me thinking of trying a recent recipe from Bon Appetit, spicy pork with asparagus and chile. This could be served over brown rice or sobas for a hearty dinner, or rolled in lettuce leaves in the mode of the dish variously called laap, larb, or larp for a more diet-friendly version. (I bought the most gorgeous head of organic red lettuce yesterday at Cure that's just crying out to roll up this pork mixture.)

For Thursday, with boneless chicken breasts on sale at both Sprouts and Sunflower, and always in my freezer, I'm thinking about a recipe from Mark Bittman's Food Matters Cookbook (which therefore doesn't have a link), a one-pot dish in which pasta is cooked right in with zucchini and chicken. It was hugely successful the time I made it before, although that might have been because I added a whole bunch of prosciutto I happened to have on hand, which flies in the face of Bittman's "less meat" mantra. Anyway, it was delicious.

And that will get us through until Friday's planning. Happy Father's Day!