Simple wild salmon, Jersey tomatoes, pasta and more

Grilled wild sockeye salmon from Canada needed only sea salt, fresh lime juice and Aleppo pepper to turn it into a great dinner entree. The serving pieces spent about 10 minutes on a non-stick grill pan sprayed with oil, and were turned once, below.

Fresh wild sockeye salmon was $8.99 a pound at Costco Wholesale in Hackensack.

Editor's note: Cooking large quantities ensures you'll have leftovers for other meals in the days ahead, saving you time in the kitchen. Many dinner leftovers are suitable for breakfast.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Fresh wild salmon is plentiful and relatively cheap. Jersey beefsteak tomatoes are appearing in the market. And organic whole-wheat pasta from Italy can be found in many stores, including ShopRite. 

Summer may be coming to a close, but there is plenty of good food to prepare simply at home.

I've been enjoying fresh wild sockeye salmon from Costco Wholesale just about every week since late May, and the price is now $8.99 a pound, down from a high of $14.99 a pound.

Fresh and canned wild salmon are among fish with the lowest amount of mercury, according to the October 2014 issue of Consumer Reports.

Slices of a Jersey beefsteak tomato from ShopRite in Paramus ($1.29 a pound) smelled earthy, but looked better than they tasted. Still, they made a nice light meal with shavings of Kirkland Signature Parmigiano Reggiano Cheese, fresh oregano, extra-virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, black pepper and Kirkland Signature Himalayan Pink Salt, which Costco says is the purest sea salt available.

What is a bit of tomato doing in my pesto pasta?

Little of this, little of that

I had a few ounces of dry organic whole-wheat spaghetti and a couple of ounces of dry organic whole-wheat linguine, both with a cooking time of 7 minutes.

And I had a little Kirkland Signature Basil Pesto and leftover marinara with anchovies and sardines in the refrigerator.

I'm not going to make a habit of this, but the combination wasn't bad, and I had enough leftovers for two other meals.

For breakfast the next day, I had pasta and eggs -- a leftover wedge of egg-white frittata with pesto and fresh tomatoes.

Save water. You can boil several ounces of pasta in a shallow pan, above.

With leftover grilled wild salmon in the refrigerator, all I had to to do was prepare fresh spinach with lots of chopped garlic for dinner on Wednesday night.

The spinach went well with the leftover pasta combination, too.

Two cups of organic brown rice, one cup of organic lentils, one cup of organic quinoa, a can of organic diced tomatoes, organic chicken stock, pignoli nuts, salt and extra-virgin olive oil all go into an electric cooker at the same time, below. I used the longer "Brown Rice" setting on my Panasonic rice cooker.

All of the ingredients for this one-dish meal can be found at Costco Wholesale, and I would have added a dozen or more peeled garlic cloves, if I had not run out of them.