Weeknight
3493 recipes found

Bulgur-Ricotta Pancakes

Roasted Fish With Lemon, Sesame and Herb Bread Crumbs
Trout is an ideal weeknight dinner because its thin fillets cook in minutes. All it really needs is some butter and lemon, but an herb-panko mixture adds freshness and crunch. The breadcrumb mixture is inspired by za’atar, a spice blend that includes sesame seeds, dried herbs and tart-citrusy sumac. Using fresh thyme and oregano instead of dried herbs, and lemon zest in place of dried sumac yields a brighter final dish. If you want to use dried za’atar, swap in 3 tablespoons of the blend for the first four ingredients. Serve the fish alongside rice, a green salad, boiled potatoes or braised chickpeas. The fish roasts in about the same time as string beans, broccolini or snap peas would, so you can also roast vegetables on a second baking sheet while the fish cooks.

Fish Milanese
This fast weeknight dinner features quick-cooking flounder prepared alla Milanese, the style of breading and frying meat cutlets. The fillets are lightly breaded and pan-fried until golden and crisp on the outside and tender in the middle. A lemony, brown-butter pan sauce with capers comes together quickly to add a tangy brininess to the dish. A bit of avocado on the side adds creaminess that balances the crisp fish and peppery arugula. Any leftover fish makes for terrific sandwiches the next day, stacked with lettuce, tomato, pickles and mayo.

Mexican Scrambled Eggs
I often eat this beloved Mexican breakfast dish for dinner. Serve the eggs with warm corn tortillas.

Fish Larb
Larb, a boldly flavored Thai dish, often combines ground chicken, ground pork or other ground meat with dried chile, scallions, shallots, fish sauce, lime, fresh herbs and nutty toasted rice, which you can make yourself or find at Asian markets. The dish also works with crumbled tofu, mushrooms, cauliflower or fish. In this quick-cooking fish version, fish fillets are pan-seared until cooked through, then broken into bite-sized pieces and tossed with the rest of the ingredients. Serve with sticky rice, small wedges of salted green cabbage, cucumber spears or lettuce leaves.

Crispy Salmon With Mixed Seeds
This recipe produces not only silky salmon with a crunchy coating of fragrant seeds, but also a shatteringly crisp skin. That’s all thanks to yogurt, which secures the seeds to the salmon and caramelizes into a crust when cooked. Mix assertive and mild seeds for a balance of textures and flavors, or swap in a ready-made seed mix like everything bagel spice or dukkah. Eat the seared salmon with more yogurt, as well as a squeeze of citrus and tuft of herbs for freshness.

Light, Fluffy and Rich Pancakes
Basic pancakes are simple to throw together and are guaranteed to delight a crowd. But go one step further, separating the eggs and beating the whites, and you turn the ordinary pancake into something almost soufflé-like. These also contain ricotta, for extra richness that doesn't weigh the pancakes down.

One-Pot Smoky Fish With Tomato, Olives and Couscous
Flaky white fish and pearl couscous simmer together in a rich, smoky tomato sauce for a punchy one-pot dinner that comes together in just half an hour. The sauce relies heavily on pantry ingredients (think anchovies, roasted red peppers, crushed tomatoes and paprika); if you like more green on your dinner plate, a lemony arugula salad is a nice complement to the smoky flavors in this dish.

Kimchi and Potato Hash With Eggs
Kimchi is punchy and potatoes are mellow, but together, they play off one another like the characters in an opposites-attract love story. Though universally adored for their comforting, creamy texture, potatoes often feel stodgy as the main ingredient of a meal, but pairing them with tangy, spicy kimchi lightens them up. Cut your potatoes into small cubes to ensure they don’t take too long to cook. Hash just does not feel complete without eggs, which make this a handy one-pan meal. Finishing the dish with a drizzle of mayonnaise (preferably Kewpie, but other brands are fine, too) and a sprinkle of furikake lends a playful edge, or you can make it even more fun to eat by wrapping up piles of the hash in nori, which adds a nice crunch and will remind you of a sushi roll.

Pasta With Fresh Herbs, Lemon and Peas
Buy a bunch of parsley along with basil or chives to keep on hand in your refrigerator. The herbs will keep for a week if properly stored. Produce departments often use misters, but greens don’t keep well once wet. When you get home, spin the herbs in salad spinner if they’re wet, wrap them in a paper towel and then bag them.

Pasta With Tomatoes, Capers, Olives and Breadcrumbs
Bread crumbs, crisped in olive oil with garlic, make a flavorful addition to just about any pasta. Make your own bread crumbs if you’ve got bread that’s drying out, and keep them in the freezer.

Fruit-Filled Scuffins
The scuffin is a frankenpastry — part scone, part muffin and, like a doughnut, filled with jam — but despite its complex genetics, it is very easy to make. It is even somewhat healthy (for a pastry, that is), using whole grain flour and flaxseeds, and keeping the butter minimal. If you are more of a butter maximalist, feel free to indulge by making a crumb topping for the scuffins: Measure 3 ounces cool butter (instead of 2 ounces melted butter) and use your fingers to rub it into the dry ingredients until coarse crumbs form. The spices can be varied (swap in nutmeg, ginger or allspice for the cinnamon or cardamom), and so can the jams. Do not use jelly, though — only jams, conserves, preserves or fruit butter will do.

Sheet-Pan Full English Breakfast
There’s always a night when you want to have breakfast for dinner, and this is how to do it British-style, in a very untraditional, sheet-pan take on the classic. Drizzled with Worcestershire sauce, the roasted mushroom and tomatoes become especially savory while the eggs are cooked until crisp-edged and runny-yolked, right in the sausage drippings. This recipe works best with pork sausages, which will release a flavorful slick of brawny fat. But other kinds of sausages — turkey, chicken, plant-based — will also work well. Serve this with plenty of buttered toast, and if you like, baked beans (most authentically, straight from a can).

Angel Hair Pasta With Peppers and Tomatoes
This simple pasta celebrates the end-of-summer harvest and is perfect for a light lunch or supper, or as part of a buffet. Bell peppers and other sweet peppers — like Corno di Toro and many other varieties of peppers of every hue — ripen in late summer, the same time as long-awaited flavorful (and multicolored) tomatoes, making their pairing seem almost preordained.

Pasta With Cauliflower, Spicy Tomato Sauce and Capers
This dish is made with perciatelli, hollow long noodles that also go by the name bucatini. Their texture is robust, supporting a robust sauce like this one. Because the noodles are hollow, they cook much more quickly than spaghetti, so keep your eye on them so they don’t get too soft. If you can't find perciatelli, spaghetti makes a fine substitute.

French Lasagne
Nigella Lawson's recipe for savory baked croissant pudding, which goes by the name of French lasagne in her house, uses up stale croissants by having the cook split and stuff them with ham and cheese, sprinkle more cheese over the top and douse them in eggs beaten with garlic-infused milk. Your croissants need not be stale to achieve wonderfully eggy, cheesy results, but if they are fresh, consider leaving them on the counter to dry out first, or even toasting them briefly in the oven.

Breakfast Udon
This bowl of udon is inspired by the delicate noodle dishes often served as the first meal of the day in Japan. A light, savory broth of dashi, soy sauce and mirin provides a gentle kickstart to your morning. Dashi, a simple seaweed-based stock, is foundational to many Japanese dishes, bolstering the umami flavors of the ingredients and providing balance to the overall dish. If you have 10 minutes and a piece of dried kombu in your pantry, make a quick kombu dashi (see Tip), but in a pinch, a lightly seasoned vegetable stock works, too. The jammy seven-minute egg and wilted spinach are enough to make this dish feel substantial, though you could also add slices of pan-fried tofu, tempura vegetable, seaweed or other hearty toppings to transform this into a complete weeknight dinner.

Greek Scrambled Eggs
For a fresh and bright variation on your morning eggs, try strapatsatha, a simple Greek dish of scrambled eggs with tomatoes. It's as simple as can be: The best, freshest tomatoes you can find are grated on a box grater and reduced a bit, then scrambled with eggs, a little olive oil and garlic. A handful of tangy feta crumbles finishes it off.

Cornmeal Pancakes With Vanilla and Pine Nuts

Blackberry Lime Smoothie With Chia Seeds and Cashews
I love the flavor and color of blackberries in a smoothie, but I don’t care for the seeds, which that won’t really blend, so I always strain my blackberry smoothies. Make more of the limeade than you need for the smoothie and keep in the refrigerator.

Sausage Gravy
It may not win any beauty contests, but white sausage gravy is glorious stuff. Ladled over a homemade biscuit, it is classic Southern breakfast fare that will sustain you well past lunchtime.

Skillet Berry and Brown Butter Toast Crumble
This is a great way to use up all the bits: a bag of frozen berries, those oats in the back of your pantry, some bread that may be past its prime. Feel free to reach for whatever frozen berries you might have on hand, and cinnamon, cardamom or any other sweet spice in place of the star anise. You could serve this with Greek yogurt instead of the cream or, if you’d like, some homemade or store-bought custard. Serve this as a brunch dish or as a late afternoon treat.

Gluten-Free Whole Grain Cheese and Mustard Muffins
A savory muffin with a delicious strong flavor.One of my favorite savory muffins. Add the nuts if you want more texture, but they have plenty without them. Because the cheese and mustard add such a nice strong flavor, I don’t mind using a gluten-free blend that includes bean flour in these muffins because I don’t really taste the bean flour.

The Original Waldorf Salad
"Millions who never visited the Waldorf owe him a debt," The New York Times wrote in 1950, upon Oscar Tschirky's death. Mr. Tschirky, a Swiss immigrant who became known as "Oscar of the Waldorf," is credited with creating this piece of Americana in 1893, a timeless dish whose popularity has spread far past the Waldorf's exclusive doors and into home kitchens. Over time, variations would include blue cheese, raisins and chopped walnuts, which can be added here alongside the celery and apples. But the original is an exercise in simplicity: four ingredients that have lived on for over a century.