Weeknight
3491 recipes found
Lemon and Garlic Chicken With Cherry Tomatoes
This is a summery dish you can make any time of year since decent cherry tomatoes are available in the markets all year long. Boneless chicken breasts are marinated in lemon juice, olive oil, garlic and rosemary before pounding them. This makes them very flavorful, and a great savory contrast to the sweet tomato topping.
Lamb With Mint Chimichurri
Though far less glorified than rib chops or legs, lamb shoulder is explosively delicious and juicy. Like the shoulders of pigs and cows, it is a hardworking muscle rippled with intramuscular fat, which makes it ideal for the stewing or braising that’s requisite this times of year. But the shoulder’s not that hardworking, which keeps it tender enough to be subjected to the shorter blasts of heat typically reserved for more elegant cuts.
Niçoise Salad With Basil and Anchovy-Lemon Vinaigrette
Here is a riff on a classic French salade niçoise. Traditionalists drape anchovy filets across the finished salad, but here, they're minced and used only in the dressing. Anchovy admirers can certainly add more for garnish — and anchovy avoiders can simply leave them out. The only cooking is boiling the potatoes and haricots verts, which can be done together in the same pot. Add a jammy egg or two if you like. Dressing the vegetables while warm helps them absorb all the good flavors more deeply, making this a salad that manages to be intense and light at the same time.
Chicken Saltimbocca
Saltimbocca means to “jump in the mouth” with flavor. It is typically a restaurant dish, but at home on a weeknight, a chicken breast version makes a very tasty facsimile. Pound the chicken and marinate it in a mixture of chopped sage, garlic and olive oil, then brown it quickly before it goes under the broiler with fontina cheese and a slice of prosciutto. Fried sage leaves make a savory garnish. There’s no sauce, but wilted spinach makes an excellent accompaniment.
Chocolate-Crusted Banana Blondies
A buttery chocolate crust and a rum-scented, banana-imbued butterscotch blondie form two distinct layers that harmonize with every bite. The contrast between crunchy bottom and chewy topping is the whole point of the exercise.
Smoked Salmon Chowder
There is a recipe for lox chowder in Mark Russ Federman’s charming memoir of his family's appetizing business on the Lower East Side of Manhattan: “Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes From the House That Herring Built.” I put a version of it into The Times in 2013. The soup tastes best made with the store's smoked salmon trimmings, which offer a lot of fatty, flavorful bits from up around the fish’s collar (and cheap, too!), but a number of test runs using supermarket smoked salmon offered evidence that the soup is still terrific when made outside the five boroughs of New York City, with a fantastic smokiness tempered by the sweet flavors of potato and leek.
Quick Tomato, White Bean and Kale Soup
A hearty bean soup does not always require hours on the stove. Using the canned variety cuts the cook time down drastically for this colorful recipe, which takes no more than an hour start to finish. You can save even more time by tackling some prep while starting to sauté the soup.
Scotch Broth with Kale
Here is a fairly basic recipe for stew, a low-and-slow variety that calls for simmering lamb (though you could use beef) with barley and root vegetables, then adding some kale at the end so that it doesn’t entirely collapse. It’s a simple equation that takes in whatever ingredients you have on hand. Start with meat, sturdy root vegetables (potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, rutabaga, parsnip, carrots) and grains (barley, wheat berries, farro), add water and simmer away. Then add kale, cabbage, spinach or chard. Dinner!
Makhani Dal (Butter Dal), Mogul-Style
Pasta Salad With Roasted Eggplant, Chile and Mint
This is a pasta salad, but it is not the mayonnaise-slicked, droopy-noodle kind found on salad bars. To bring out the soft meatiness of the eggplant, roast cubes of it until they collapse into a caramelized heap, and toss them with chopped raw tomatoes and a handful of salty capers. Then dress the vegetables and pasta in the pungent, spicy oil, which is rich with anchovies, browned garlic and chiles, a strong contrast to the sweetness of the tomatoes and eggplant.
Brussels Sprouts With Bacon and Chestnuts
Pasta With Pesto
Pesto Pasta
Toasted walnuts (or pine nuts), a fistful of fresh basil, Parmesan, garlic and olive oil is all you need for a simple and practically perfect pesto that tastes like the best of summer.
Vietnamese-Inspired Cabbage Salad With Tofu
Cabbages are the quintessential storage vegetable. You can cut a cabbage in quarters or thirds and use one piece at a time. The other hunks will keep, wrapped well in the vegetable crisper, for at least two weeks, and potentially a lot longer if you mist them with water every once in a while. That means you can buy one large cabbage and use it several times for different recipes, experiencing the deceptively versatile vegetable many ways. Fried tofu turns this Vietnamese-inspired slaw into more of a meal.
Orange and Olive Salad
Temple oranges are shiny, spongy to the touch and deeply rutted with pores, like a cartoonist’s idea of an orange. The temple orange, which arrives at stores in the winter, is worth seeking out. Start with the peel, which is thin and tight to the pulp yet zippers off as cleanly as that of the tangerine. The segments have little pith, and though their skin is delicate, they separate neatly, sparing your shirt. Pop a sector, fat and pulpy, into your mouth, and the thing just bursts. Temples are far juicier than most oranges, with a tarter, more complex taste. This is a recipe, adapted from “Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book” (Atheneum, 1982), that showcases their sweetness, set off by bitter greens, salty olives and black pepper.
Easy Christmas Pudding (Without the Rum)
Chicken Skin Tacos
Nate Gutierrez, the chef and owner of Nate’s Taco Truck and Nate’s Taco Truck Stop in Richmond, Va., could not stop snacking on the skin left over from his roast chickens. So, he decided to make chicken skin crisp on his flattop and offer it in a taco. The chicken-skin tacos sell out whenever they are on the menu. This recipe is adapted from his work: chicken breasts are cooked, the skin crisped and the meat shredded, and the whole thing stuffed into a tortilla. Top at will.
Grilled Peaches With Dukkah and Blueberries
Dukkah? It’s an Egyptian blend of nuts, seeds and spices, which you can either buy or make yourself. Combine it with a grilled ripe peach for a superlative summer experience, especially with freshly whipped cream and a scattering of blueberries. Simply dab the cut fruit with some olive oil and place on a hot grill until lightly toasted and soft. The result is reminiscent of peach pie without the crust, warm and yielding, with just a hint of char.
Cumin-Scented Summer Squash Salad
In the summer, squash of all kinds is in abundance. This recipe uses zucchini, or any other summer variety you have on hand or pick up at the farmers’ market. The squash in this North African salad is lightly steamed.
Grilled Eggplant Salad
Here is a deeply flavored salad that can be prepared entirely outdoors, keeping the heat out of the kitchen. Grill a whole fat purple globe eggplant until the skin blisters. Then scrape the soft insides into a bowl and season them with red wine vinegar, garlic, good olive oil and fresh herbs. A few capers on top add a pleasing brininess. Serve it with pita bread, a good rosé and a hunk of feta, and want for nothing more.
Steamed Eggplant With Spicy Peanut Sauce
Slow-Roasted Cherry Tomatoes With Basil Oil
When you roast cherry tomatoes, they caramelize and become even sweeter. This dish was inspired by a huge pile of roasted red and yellow cherry tomatoes that a friend served at a dinner party recently; they were drizzled with diluted pesto and placed alongside a luxurious mound of burrata. You can serve these as an appetizer (have napkins close by) or side dish, or tossed with pasta. You can easily multiply this recipe, but you won’t have to use much more olive oil to coat the tomatoes. This gorgeous emerald-colored oil is a condiment that you can keep in your refrigerator for up to a week. Keep it in a squeeze bottle, and drizzle it over tomatoes, fish, chicken or other vegetables. It looks beautiful on a white plate, and a little goes a long way.
Cake-Flour Biscuits
Cake flour, a low-protein flour that is available in supermarkets from Boston to Chicago, north to Seattle and down to Los Angeles, makes a fine biscuit with a delicate, silken texture that does well with syrups and runny fried eggs.
Yogurt Soup With Spelt, Cucumbers and Watercress
Chilled soups are terrific in sweltering summer heat. This yogurt soup in particular has nice body and crunch, from the substantial whole grains (spelt, farro or wheat berries) and finely chopped cucumbers. The addition of watercress, diced tomatoes, herbs, garlic and lemon juice means that every spoonful ferries with it a mix of flavors and textures. Use good quality plain yogurt here (preferably whole-milk yogurt, though low-fat is fine), and you will be rewarded with an authentically tangy, creamy soup that manages to be filling and refreshing.