Weekday Dinner Ideas

With Sunday already speeding by, it's time to think about easy dinners for the rest of the week. I have a weakness for Whole Foods' Market Made Hatch chile tequila lime burgers, and with them on sale for $3.99 a pound, they'll make a super simple dinner for tomorrow night. Since Whole Foods' sale is through the 16th, an unusually long one for them, there's even time for another round later if we choose. If you prefer to make your own, the current issue of Saveur magazine has a great article on New Mexican chiles (not yet online), accompanied by a very tempting recipe for green chile cheeseburgers. Since it's a little early for this year's Hatch chile crop, and Whole Foods' sale has already been going on for a while, I have a suspicion they might be doing what I should be too: clearing out the remainder of chiles frozen from last year's crop. There are still a couple of bags of handsome ones in my freezer.

For Tuesday, since pasta has yet to appear in the week's menus, we'll go back to the chicken sausage sales at both Sprouts and Sunflower to do a simple pasta with sausage dish. The pasta sauce can be something as simple as a fine one from a jar (I like Muir Glen and have recently heard great praise for Mom's brand), spiffed up with some sauteed onions and bell pepper. If making from scratch, one I like is the sauce that accompanies mushroom and sausage ragu with polenta from Cooking Light.

For Wednesday, we always have something big made over the weekend that serves as an easy midweek reheat, and this week it's tonight's corn and fingerling potato chowder with applewood-smoked bacon from Cooking Light. Actually, the rest of the family will be doing that reheating and salad-making on Wednesday, since I get to go to a dinner for local food bloggers that evening at the Whole Foods Pearl Street store, yahoo!

To finish off the planning through Thursday, the various ground meat sales happening through Wednesday have me thinking again of the Lao/Thai dish variously known as laab, larb, or laap. I first encountered it in a great article on the cuisine of Laos in Saveur magazine a year or so ago, which included a way-too-ambitious (but undoubtedly highly authentic) recipe for minced pork salad. For midweek cooking, I use this much simplified one, and speed it even further by skipping the toasted rice step, still with delicious results. For the ground meat, I'll catch either Sprouts' sale on ground turkey, chicken breast, or pork or Sunflower's sale on ground chicken by Wednesday.

And that will get us through to next Friday's planning, which will be here all too shortly.