Weeknight
3493 recipes found
Balkan Burgers
Called pljeskavica, pronounced PLYESS-ka-vee-tsa, this burger as wide as a birthday cake is beloved in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and Montenegro; and more recently in Italy, Germany, Chicago as well as Queens.
Grilled Chicken Breasts With Spicy Cucumbers
Light and refreshing, yet packed with flavor from herbs, jalapeños and garlic, this is an easy, after-work meal that can be endlessly adapted to suit what you’ve got on hand. Substitute other thinly sliced raw vegetables for the cucumbers (zucchini, carrot, radishes, celery, cabbage, fennel), and other herbs for the cilantro and parsley (dill, basil, mint). Just be sure not to overcook the flattened chicken, which can happen in an instant.
Roasted Cauliflower, Paneer and Lentil Salad
The Indian cheese paneer doesn’t typically show up in salads, but this one from food writer Nik Sharma’s cookbook, “Season,” involves cutting paneer into cubes and roasting it alongside cauliflower for about 25 minutes (though doing so for longer wouldn’t hurt). Paneer maintains its structure in heat, so its skin will come out of the oven charred, its insides still soft. You’ll stir the paneer and cauliflower with green and black lentils, cooked and drained, and scallions, resulting in a pleasing jumble of textures. Drizzle it with a cilantro-lime dressing, which gives the salad a tart kick.
Turkish-Style Braised Leeks
Pork-Fennel Burger
For this burger, you need fat. Pork shoulder is almost imperative for the correct balance of lean and fat. You need strong spices; as a starting point, you cannot beat fennel seeds and black pepper. And you need adequate salt, an essential in any good burger. Variations, of course, are not just possible but advisable. Chopped fresh fennel or chopped onion are spectacular additions. When it is cooked over high heat, whether on a grill or in a pan or broiler, until just done, the result is consistently juicy, super flavorful and sublimely tender. And it browns, developing a dark, crisp crust like no beef burger I’ve ever had.
Spicy Grilled Chicken With Tomato-Cucumber Relish
Chicken thighs meet with a mellow mix of Indian spices and are grilled into weekend dinner excellence. In Indian cooking, most spices are toasted before they’re used, a process that brings up their aromatics and mellows and rounds their flavors. Here they’re then rubbed onto chicken thighs and grilled, which gives them an additional smokiness that pairs beautifully with the tomato-and-cucumber relish.
Grilled Clams With Fried Garlic
Perfect Soy-Grilled Steak
You may think you don't have the time to marinate meat before grilling it, but it's time-consuming only if you think a marinade has to tenderize. As far as I'm concerned, there are only two goals in marinating: to add flavor and to promote browning and crispness. Neither of these requires long soaking, although dunking the meat while the grill heats contributes to a slightly greater penetration of flavor. This marinade of soy sauce, ginger, garlic, honey and lime is ideal for steak, but it works beautifully with any tender meats like burgers, boneless chicken, tuna and swordfish, all of which can be turned in the sauce before putting them on the grill. Longer-cooking meats, like bone-in chicken, should be cooked within 10 minutes of doneness before basting with the sauce.
Grilled Lamb Chops With Lettuce and Ranch Dressing
Cooking lamb chops hot and fast keeps them juicy and perfectly pink inside. Here, they’re first marinated in an herby garlic paste, then grilled or broiled and served with crisp lettuce hearts and a tangy ranch dressing (made from more of that same herb garlic paste). Quick and easy enough for a weeknight, these chops are also always an impressive meal to serve to guests. You’ll probably have some ranch dressing left over. It will keep for a week in the fridge and is also excellent as a sauce for grilled chicken, or as a dip for vegetables and crackers.
Turkey and Vegetable Burgers
Turkey meat is relatively lean, and so turkey burgers are often quite dry. The vegetables in this particular burger help keep the patty moist.
Brown Sugar Shortcake with Warm Bourbon Peaches
The juicier the peaches, the better this luscious summer dessert will be. Handle the dough lightly and make sure not to overbake it. Assemble the whole thing just before serving, and watch it disappear.
Spiced Lamb Burgers
This recipe came from a revelation in the ’70s, when my friend Semeon Tsalbins introduced me to the lamb burger. It is ground lamb — shoulder is best — highly seasoned and grilled rare. Because lamb is the most full-flavored of the everyday meats, it makes a more delicious plain burger than beef. Cooked with nothing but salt, it’s fantastic. Cooked with a variety of spices, as it is here, it’s a game-changer. You can also stuff the burger, as Mr. Tsalbins does on occasion, with smoked mozzarella.
Lemony White Beans With Anchovy and Parmesan
These white beans, adapted from Alison Roman's cookbook "Nothing Fancy" (Clarkson Potter, 2019), could potentially be a whole meal, but they are also great alongside another protein since they pull double duty as both starch and salad. While this dish is beautifully seasonally agnostic, it is a summery dream with grilled whole trout or lamb shoulder, and lots of cold red or white wine, preferably in the sunny outdoors.
Orzo With Fresh Tomato
Chicken Birria
Birria, a classic Mexican stew from Jalisco, is traditionally made with goat but also enjoyed with lamb or beef. This weeknight version features juicy chicken thighs for faster cooking. A quick blender sauce of dried chiles, garlic and tomatoes creates a smoky and rich base for the stew, which deepens in flavor as the chicken simmers. Here, the birria is enjoyed as a stew, but it also makes terrific tacos: Simply dip tortillas in the warm broth, fill them with shredded chicken and top with chopped white onion and cilantro, then fold in half and pan-fry until golden and crispy.
Sweet and Salty Grilled Pork With Citrus and Herbs
Typically prepared as a long-cooked stew or braise, pork shoulder is remarkably (and perhaps surprisingly) fantastic when treated like a steak. This means cooked hot and fast so it’s charred on the outside and medium-rare on the inside. While a grill is ideal here, it can also be prepared on the stovetop in a very hot cast-iron skillet. The garlicky, salty, sweet marinade also doubles as a dressing to be poured over crunchy leaves of lettuce, fresh herbs and, if you’re looking for something more substantial, some sort of rice noodle or plain cooked rice.
Simple Grilled Lamb Chops
Danish Rice Pudding With Fresh Cherries
Chicken Soup With Leeks and Lemon
This is inspired by both the classic Greek soup avgolemono and Scottish cockaleekee. Start with a flavorful chicken or turkey broth, simmer leeks and rice or bulgur in the soup until tender, then enrich with eggs and lemon. The trick here is to begin with a flavorful stock and not to allow the eggs to curdle when you combine the soup and the avgolemono sauce. You can make a vegetarian version of this using a garlic broth or by making a robust vegetable stock using the dark leafy parts of the leeks.
Stir-Fried Chicken With Ketchup
I learned about the genesis of this dish from Suvir Saran, an Indian chef in New York. Loosely inspired by chicken Manchurian, this dish is based on an ingredient that is in almost every refrigerator. It's ketchup, here, stir-fried with chicken. Before you turn your nose up, think how good ketchup can taste. In the dish he cooked for me, Mr. Saran tossed cauliflower in a slurry of cornstarch and egg, then deep-fried it. The crust was exquisite, and the cauliflower perfectly cooked. But it was what happened next that really got my attention: He finished the cauliflower in a sauce, made in about three minutes, containing nothing more than ketchup, garlic and cayenne pepper.
Chicken Soup With Lime and Avocado
When I lived in France, in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, I hardly ever ate avocados. Those sold in the markets were smooth, thin-skinned varieties grown mostly in Israel. They were watery, not as creamy or nutty-tasting as Haas avocados, the dark, pebbly-skinned variety that we get in California. “Poor man’s butter,” they used to call avocados when my father was a child. (Now they would more aptly be described as “rich man’s butter.”) Simple Mexican soups like this one often include avocado, which is diced or sliced and added to the soup when it’s ladled into bowls.
Grilled Salmon on Spinach
Garlic-Braised Chicken
“It’s the only place where you can find a giant vat of peeled garlic, because it’s the only place that truly understands how much garlic you’ll need for the kind of food your people eat,” Michelle Zauner writes about the supermarket H Mart in her memoir, “Crying in H Mart.” Thankfully, many other grocery stores now sell containers of peeled garlic cloves. If you don’t already buy those, then this recipe is a great reason to start. Chicken thighs, white pepper, chardonnay and 20 garlic cloves are all you need for this zinger of a one-pot meal, which braises in an hour. In that time, chicken fat, wine and water turn into a luscious sauce packed with garlicky redolence. The white pepper, musky and full of earthiness, is a key taste here, so don’t skip it.
Broccoli and Scallions With Thai-Style Vinaigrette
Roasting gives broccoli an incredible texture and crunch, and it softens and sweetens the bite of the scallions. This is paired with a highly addictive vinaigrette that is a play on the classic Thai dipping sauce prik nam pla. If you’re lucky enough to find yourself with leftovers, spoon it over roast fish, chicken or even plain white rice.