Menu for the Week of November 8

It's been a while since I've posted one of these, huh? Planning a weekly menu is always a chore, but as I've learned over this past summer, it is a necessity for us. My work schedule has been crazy and irregular, and so I have been blowing off the menu planning. As a result, I've been frequently stressed out at mealtimes.

So, I'm going to try to buckle back down and plan again. This week I was not selling at my booth at the Newburyport Farmers' Market so I was able to visit it as a customer. I wanted to take advantage of whatever products caught my eye, so my shopping list needed to be written in a very general way.

This was my shopping list:

• Vegetables for Indian-style Sunday dinner
• Vegetables for Tuesday night dinner
• Vegetables for 2 side dishes
• Meat for Wednesday night dinner
• Beef for Monday night dinner (recipe testing)

What was great about this list: I picked up a gorgeous head of romanesco broccoli, beautiful Swiss chard (see above), some delicious fingerling potatoes, more of that awesome purple broccoli, and some goat stew meat and an eye of round roast. All local, all delicious. I got to take advantage of what was available and buy on a whim, as opposed to sticking firmly to a detailed list.

So here's the menu I ended up with for the week:

Sunday

Indian dinner - this meal was inspired by a visit to Shalimar Foods in Cambridge. So many great ingredients and a blog post to come! All the recipes I used were from the new Gourmet cookbook, Gourmet Today.

South Indian Shrimp Curry

Lentil Stew

Romanesco Broccoli and Potatoes (original recipe called for cauliflower, the romanesco was a nice, if non-traditional, change)

Basmati Rice

Monday

Beef Carbonnade (testing this recipe for a series of classes I'm teaching)

Green Salad

Potatoes

Tuesday

Frascatelli (a kind of semolina pasta I read about recently - will let you know how it goes) with Swiss chard saute

Roasted Broccoli

Wednesday

Curried Goat Stew

Jasmine Rice

Thursday

Vegetable Fried Rice (using up leftover rice and leftover bits from the fridge)

Friday

Field trip