Weekday Dinner Ideas

And oh what a week, including Christmas.  Prior to the excesses, we'll keep it light for tomorrow.  The organic eggplants for just 99 cents each at Sprouts through Wednesday have me thinking of a vegetarian dish from an old favorite cookbook, Mediterranean Light, which therefore doesn't have a link.  The book's eggplant gratin is a much lighter version than others you might find on the web (the whole idea of this cookbook is to take an already healthy cuisine and even lighten up on that).  As written, it calls for making a tomato sauce from scratch, but using a quality jarred pasta sauce like Muir Glen Organic reduces the steps to baking a couple of eggplants at 450 for 20 minutes, layering sauce and sliced eggplant with herbs (I might sneak in a bit of cheese) and baking for 30 to 40 minutes.  A nice prelude to the rest of the week.

For Christmas Eve on Tuesday, we've recently gotten into toying with the southern Italian tradition of the Feast of the Seven Fishes for Christmas Eve, following a spectacular dinner at I Trulli in New York City last year (you can see their 2013 menu here, and I had the squid ink pasta and the swordfish last year - so good!).  Being in Boulder this year, my attempt will be far more humble, involving four fish at most and only two courses for the family.  The basis will be creamy lobster pappardelle from Cooking Light.  Whole Foods has very fine lobster tails on sale for $6 each through the 31st.  To increase my fish count, I'm thinking about adding a few shrimp and also bay scallops.  If we start off with an appetizer of Whole Foods' lovely smoked salmon spread on rice chips or Nut Thins, we're up to four fish.  This past Wednesday's New York Times had an article on the seven fishes that said you could also count a salad  including anchovies in the dressing as one of your fishes, but I'm not that eager to reach seven.

Christmas Day tends to be a standing rib roast in this house, a fairly straightforward dish to make (especially since the outside meat griller man gets put in charge of this inside roast).  Sides are still a bit in flux.  I'm thinking about mashed potatoes with crispy shallots from Food and Wine magazine, plus some roasted asparagus ($1.88 a pound at Lucky's in Longmont through Christmas), and also a beet salad recipe received from a friend that I think would go well with this dinner, although I think that recipe was originally intended as one for Thanksgiving.

We'll attempt to compensate for the excesses on Thursday with something ascetic like a tofu stir-fry, incorporating some of that $1.88 a pound asparagus previously purchased from Lucky's.

Which gets us through the week in a hopefully sane and relatively healthy manner, and we haven't even incorporated a bouche de Noel!