Weekday Dinner Ideas

My, what a week, with both Mardi Gras and Valentine's Day falling within it.  Always fun to celebrate, but midweek cooking also needs to stay pretty quick and easy, and I think I've got it down.

For an easy start to an easy week, we'll start with something I almost never do for tomorrow:  actual beef burgers.  This is inspired by today being the last day of Sprouts' 72-hour sale that includes grass-fed organic ground beef for the excellent price of $3.99 a pound (the sale price rises to $6.99 after today, which shows you how good today's price is).  I'll try to emulate the excellent Hatch chile burgers I've had from Whole Foods by dicing one or two chiles pulled from my stock in the freezer to mix into the burger.  Sprouts also has five pound bags of organic russets for $2.50 a bag, suggesting microwaved "baked" potatoes on the side, and don't forget their asparagus at $1.49 a pound through Wednesday for something green.

Tuesday, we'll be ready to laissez les bons temps rouler for Mardi Gras, but unlike some folks in New Orleans, we don't have the whole day available to prepare the celebrations.  I fixed that by planning my big gumbo for this weekend (see the weekend post), so we'll do a quick reheat of it for Tuesday evening.  With some rice to go under the gumbo and a salad to go on the side, we'll have plenty of time to devote to the cocktails and bead-wearing.

Having kind of burned out on cooking recently, I'm continuing my easy week plan for Wednesday with another easy reheat, the comfort food baked rigatoni with ricotta and collard greens from MyRecipes.com.  Some more of that $1.49 a pound asparagus from Sprouts will probably go on the side on the last day of the sale.

I'll need to perk up a bit on the cooking front for Thursday, since that's Valentine's Day.  Since I don't think presenting your sweetie with a butter-topped ribeye steak and a cheese and sour cream potato gratin on the side, with a 1000 calorie dessert is the best way to say "I Love You" (isn't that more like saying "Have you made your final directives?"), we have a traditional meal for the day that's delicious, quick and easy, and probably gets the nod from nutritionists:  salmon, mustard greens and potatoes with mustard-dill glaze from Bon Appetit.  If somebody has something that's more delicious while being equally nutritious, quick, easy, and also reasonably priced, I'd love to hear it.

And that should get us easily through a week that otherwise could have been a lot of work!