Weeknight Kitchen

You can’t deny yourself a good potato – fact! Especially if it is a potato salad that has the added goodness of nuts, lentils and greens. You simply can’t go wrong.

This recipe is very dear to my heart, as it was my first attempt to use ingredients that didn’t normally go together, but made sense to me. In Asian cooking, vinegar is often used to cut saltiness from soy sauce or other ingredients. For me, balsamic vinegar has the perfect mix of sweetness, acidity, and body to combine with the brown sugar and soy sauce here.

This is one amazing steak. It’s simple to prepare and you get maximum flavor in a short period of time. Flank steak is a lean cut, so be careful you don’t overcook it; medium-rare is ideal.

Gujarati Corn on the Cob Curry | Gujarati makai subji

Fresh Pacific halibut is a seasonal splurge. It needs very little to enhance its flavor—in fact, it’s almost a sin to fuss too much with it. I like to prepare it simply: pan-seared until golden and crisp with a quick sauté of sweet, garlicky cherry tomatoes on the side. Depending on how long you cook the tomatoes, they can be firm and fresh or soft and jammy. I usually aim for somewhere right in between, but they’re delicious either way.

Often, I have a bit of chicken left over from dinner that I use up the next day for lunch. Here is a really delicious summer version, using fresh-cooked chicken breasts; obviously, you can swap in leftover roast chicken.

If you’ve never had a bánh mì, it is a Vietnamese sandwich, typically made with salty-sweet marinated pork. It’s tangy, too, from the pickled radishes and carrots, and spicy from the jalapeños. It’s all of my favorite flavors housed between a crusty baguette. I’ve turned this classic sandwich into a lighter, plant-forward salad, fusing in a Tex-Mex avocado crema as the dressing. The honey–soy sauce roasted chickpeas, used in place of the pork, are good on their own as a snack. This salad takes a bit of work when done in a single breadth, but most of it can be made ahead, like the Quick-Pickled Radishes and Carrots, the croutons, and even the Avocado Crema. When prepped in advance, dinner takes no time at all to throw together and tastes this good. 

I am not sure that I want to live in a world where ranch dressing is more beloved than Green Goddess, which is superior in both name and taste, so I’m doing everything in my power to bring this vibrant, herb-packed green dressing into the limelight. Green Goddess is a kitchen MVP. It can be used as a salad dressing, yes, but it’s also a dip for crudités, a marinade for grilled chicken, and, if you’re one of the weirdos who like to do this, it’s great on pizza or with French fries too. For this super-green salad, I combine crunchy romaine, cucumbers, snap peas, green onions, and avocado, then douse it with the irresistible dressing.

Ask the fishmonger to cut the grouper into 1-inch cubes for you and remove the shells and veins from the shrimp. You’ll want to purchase clams that are the same size so that they cook evenly. Adding the clams to the stock while it comes to a boil helps speed up the process.

It takes only five minutes to cook pork cutlets into perfect schnitzel. With only a handful of ingredients, a crisp and bright salad of cucumbers with dill and yogurt is a simple accompaniment to the meal.