Weekday Dinner Ideas

This blog started from friends' suggestions that I share my weekly menu planning lists that draw inspiration from local natural sales.  I'm still grateful for the idea and the encouragement, but I also find that writing the blog tends to skew my normal thinking about those menus; I feel tendencies to a) use more recipe-based items for which I can share links, rather than simpler just-do-it-quickly cooking, and b) be so influenced by sales reporting that my menus veer away from the health-first base I used to start with.  This week, I'm noticing those tendencies particularly strongly, as the current sales bring to mind a slew of warming, yet not exactly lean winter dinners, involving extensive recipes.  So instead of caving to every published recipe that capitalizes on these sales, I'm trying hard to regain some balance instead.  So here goes.

Tomorrow won't exactly feature the lean part, but it will return to no-recipe easy:  I'm very impressed that Sprouts has 100% grass-fed organic ground beef for $4.99 a pound, so despite the multitude of recipes out there incorporating ground beef, we'll skip them all in favor of plain ol' burgers.  Some organic russets ($2.50 for a five pound bag at Sprouts) mashed with lowfat buttermilk (tangy and very rich tasting, despite being lowfat), and something green, like Sprouts' organic broccoli at $1.69 a pound will round it out.

Tuesday is our usual reheat of something big made over the weekend, which this week is our slow-cook Tuscan pork with white beans from Cooking Light.  Although the nutritional facts look pretty good, I still feel a little guilty making the recipe as called for, which incorporates the current excellent deals at both Sprouts and Whole Foods on pork shoulder roast, not the leanest cut of pork.

To make amends for two meaty dishes in a row, we'll go vegetarian for Wednesday, with a simple recipe I've been wanting to try from Cooking Light, tomato and mozzarella risotto.  I have my canned Muir Glen organic tomatoes from Sprouts' very good sale last week, and I'm hoping they might still have organic bulk spinach on sale, as it has been for so many weeks, although only the bulk spring mix is mentioned in this week's ad.

For Thursday, we'll again head back to non-recipe simplicity, catching some of the $1.99 a pound boneless skinless chicken breasts at Sprouts by sales' end Wednesday to do some sort of simply sauteed chicken dish.  I like to mix sauteed diced chicken with some kind of prepared special starch, like the Near East rice pilaf I currently have in the cupboard (or leave the breasts whole and do the starch on the side).  I'd bet the Lundberg risotto boxes that Sprouts has on BOGO through Wednesday would also do well.

Which gets us through a week where my planning is maintaining something of its original goals of balancing sales with health and simplicity, rather than jumping into all those time-consuming, fatty recipes that this week's sales were suggesting to me.