Weekend Dinner Ideas, Including July 4th

It will be a busy Friday, so here's a quick summary of what's on deck for the long, hot holiday weekend, which will empasize grilling and cooling foods for hot temps.

We'll start it off with grilling tonight, going back to the fresh wild salmon that's $9.99 a pound at Sprouts, King Soopers, and Safeway. To dress it up a bit, we'll do it as grilled salmon with nectarine salsa from Bon Appetit, using the beautiful organic peaches Whole Foods has on sale for $1.99 a pound instead of the nectarines. Packages of diced organic yams will also go on the grill, and the side veggie will probably be some of the mountain of corn I got at Whole Foods' one-day sale this week.

With temperatures up across the weekend, by tomorrow we'll be thinking about picnic style dining, which brings to mind Mark Bittman's useful 101 20-Minute Dishes for Inspired Picnics from the New York Times. The pesto chicken rolls (number two) are a favorite, that we'll accompany with the tomato and peach salad (number four), using more of the gorgeous organic peaches from Whole Foods.

We still haven't made something big that will do for a midweek reheat as well, so on Sunday, we'll finish off the rest of the mountain of fresh corn from the Whole Foods one-day sale by doing a corn chowder, which will probably be corn and fingerling potato chowder with applewood-smoked bacon from Cooking Light. Both Whole Foods and Alfalfa's have their own in-house varieties of wonderful bacon to purchase in just the right number of slices you need.

For Monday, the 4th of July (yahoo!), we'll of course turn back to the grill, this time with the boneless Harris Ranch New York strip steaks that Sunflower has for $4.99 a pound. A potato salad will go on the side, and with radishes and snap peas in abundance in stores and the Farmer's Market right now, a good one to do is Caesar potato salad with sugar snap peas from Bon Appetit. In addition to being seasonal, I love how light this is for a potato salad, with those extra veggies and the olive oil/Dijon dressing.

And that will get us through the long holiday weekend. Enjoy!