On June 14, Jennifer had a post on "Whining & Dining" called "Big Food" about food items from Costco that could help with doing easy dinners. Now we go to Costco at least every other week, usually to buy bales of paper towels or cases of Perrier, huge boxes of Cheerios and bottles of the Kirkland store brand olive oil. That's also where I bought my HP printer/scanner/copier and the 40-inch Sony Bravia HD-LCD television for pizza and movie night.

But not much in the way of actual eating-type food until recently.

One of our discoveries is the Chef Bruce Aidells turkey and chicken sausages. We tried several of the Roasted Red Pepper and Corn variety, which were very tasty and just a little spicy. They're pictured here (grilled over charcoal) with potato and green bean salad and grilled onions and tomatoes; this was our Fourth of July dinner. Being a Costco purchase, of course, one has to buy in bulk, so the two-part package consists of 14 sausages that total 48 ounces. You can open one package and freeze the other.

The package states that the sausages are "minimally processed" and that they contain "no gluten, no MSG, no nitrates," though the product description on the company's Website (aidells.com) indicates that there is sodium nitrate, if that’s a concern. The sausages come in a dizzying array of styles, of which the Wolfchase Costco had only three.

The other item was a fillet of fresh wild Copper River sockeye salmon. The salmon-rich Copper River is in southeast Alaska. At about $10 a pound, this was way cheaper than prices you see on the Internet, which run from $14 to $22 a pound, and cheaper than at most fish markets or grocery stores. The fillet is long and not as thick as the salmon at Fresh Market, and because it’s so lean so you have to be careful cooking it; we like salmon just past rare. This was delicious, not at all fishy, and had a dense, lush texture. It’s pictured here, sprinkled with Italian parsley, olive oil, garlic and ginger; briefly broiled; and served with fingerling potatoes and green and purple cabbage sprouts. This fillet, which weighed about a pound, was sufficient for us for dinner and, later in the week, salmon tacos.