Hi and welcome to Five Weeknight Dishes. One question I’ve gotten a lot since I started writing this newsletter is how many nights I cook dinner during the workweek. The answer is not five.
I typically cook a meal from scratch on two weeknights, maybe three. You don’t need to do more than that! Pick at least one recipe that makes good leftovers, doubling or stretching them with eggs, vegetables, toast or grains if necessary. Or supplement with something else in the fridge or cabinet. Dinner can be a fun, crazy mishmash; photographers will not be showing up to document the meal.
As for the other nights: My partner cooks, or occasionally we order chicken parm or go out (luxuries of urban and suburban life), or eat our preferred brand of freezer pizza with a nice big salad.
The reason I share five dishes is not because I want to map out Monday to Friday, but because I want to give you options! At least two vegetarian dishes, and chicken, and pasta and seafood too. (And not a lot of red meat, for many reasons, and also because it’s just not my thing.) As always, let me know what you think at dearemily@nytimes.com.
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Here are five dishes for the week:
Spring chicken miso soup.CreditRomulo Yanes for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Vivian Lui.
This delicious soup tastes like restaurant food, with flavors that are nuanced and bold. I also have a few small suggestions for streamlining it: Grate both the garlic and ginger. Cook the noodles while the broth simmers. Cook the leeks and snap peas directly in the broth, right before you add the spinach (and though the soup is wonderful with the leeks, you could skip them and add sliced scallions to the final bowls for an allium-y touch). This fed two adults for two nights, and it could easily be doubled. Store the noodles and broth in separate containers.
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2. Sheet-Pan Trout With Garlicky Broccolini
This kicky recipe is one-night-only, best eaten immediately after cooking. But it’s fast and good for you, and easy to pull off. Tradeoffs. Swap in smashed boiled potatoes, kale leaves or halved cherry tomatoes for the broccolini; you could also add a second sheet pan to the oven with more vegetables to carry you through the week, like skinny carrots or small cauliflower florets, tossed with oil and seasoned with salt and pepper.
3. Spicy Sheet-Pan Sausage and Squash
It’s sort of wild how tasty this is for how little it requires of you in the kitchen, especially if you start with good sausage and precut squash. To make this recipe stretch for two nights, you could add two more sausages or extra squash to the pan, or just double it outright with two pans; make a large pot of farro or rice; and serve in bowls topped with handfuls of arugula and herbs tossed with lemon juice and oil. Running the sausages under the broiler to brown before serving helps the aesthetics quite a lot.
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5. Grilled Broccoli With Soy Sauce, Maple Syrup and Balsamic Vinegar
Broccoli is the perfect medium for this sweet-and-salty sauce: The flavor gets tangled in the florets, which crisp up nicely in the heat. In fact we had this for dinner last night, roasted in the oven on a sheet pan at 450 degrees for about 18 minutes. It’s great served over rice and sprinkled with toasted nuts, which is how we ate it; if you want to bulk up the meal, serve it with tofu and simple broiled fish.
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Thank you for reading! You can find all these recipes in your weekly plan, and there are thousands more for you to dive into on NYT Cooking. (Become a subscriber!) Follow NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest, and here I am on Instagram. Previous newsletters are archived here. I’m dearemily@nytimes.com, and if you have any problems with your account, email cookingcare@nytimes.com.
