Sunday

Summer pasta with tomatoes, arugula, and bacon (recipe in the comments)
Galia melon

Hot tea
Chocolate chip cookies
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This is one of those limited time meals. You can only make this when cherry tomatoes are fresh and super sweet. When you make it when you're just getting pints at the grocery store, the flavor is truly pale and it doesn't seem worth it. But now, when we get cherry tomatoes at the farmers market that taste almost syrupy, this is a dream. You can do it with two pints of red tomatoes, but the mix of colors is really fabulous (orange is my favorite). We have tried this in the past with spinach when the arugula didn't look good and it's really flat, so hold out for a week with good cherry tomatoes AND arugula. It's worth it.

Prep Notes
Difficulty: Easy
Chopping: Garlic, tomatoes (halved), melon
Time: 30 minutes
Make ahead: This is best fresh, but hold up unusually well for lunch the next day.

Our reaction:
"A perfect version for early fall OR late winter!"

The kid report:
T liked all of this except the arugula, but he thought the fettuccini was hard to eat.

Friday

Spinach fettuccine with artichokes and tomatoes (recipe in the comments)
Radish and baby lettuce salad

Hot tea
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I'm not usually a big fan of sun dried tomatoes or spinach pasta. So it seems crazy that I printed this recipe out. Nonetheless, relatively recently, I did. We even decided to make it pretty quickly afterwards. Here's the most amazing part - it's wonderful and both the ingredients I usually don't like are a big part of why. The flavor combination is lovely. My only caveat is that the fresh spinach pasta has to be good. Wegman's brand worked very well!

Prep Notes
Difficulty: Easy
Chopping: Onion, artichokes, garlic, sun dried tomatoes, thyme
Time: 35 minutes
Make ahead: I would do this last minute.

Reaction
J: "Spinach pasta turns out to be excellent!"
M: "Spring-y, green, and satisfying!"