Welcome back to Five Weeknight Dishes. This week, I’ve been thinking about The Times’s original weeknight columnist, the French chef Pierre Franey, who wrote “60-Minute Gourmet.” (He pretty much invented boneless chicken breasts, and before chicken nuggets were a thing, he had us making goujonettes for dinner parties.) When he started in 1975, the ingredients available to most home cooks were pretty limited, as they are right now: a lot of dried, canned and frozen staples; the most basic fresh produce; and only the occasional fresh herbs or tomatoes or raspberries.
Since this is my last column for now — Emily Weinstein will be back in this space next week — I’ll leave you with my big takeaway from Mr. Franey: As long as you have butter and cream and eggs and some kind of onion, you can definitely make a good dinner. And when in doubt, always make a pan sauce.
Here are five recipes for the week:
1. Crispy Frico Chicken Breasts With Mushrooms and Thyme
“Frico” is a fun way of saying “Parmesan-crusted,” an excellent treatment for boneless chicken breasts. You really can make this with any combination of quick-cooking vegetables — but you must make it in a nonstick skillet.
2. Spiced Chickpea Salad With Tahini and Pita Chips
I know some of you are tired of chickpeas (because you write and tell me so every week!), but this main-dish salad has so many things going on — crispy pita, tahini dressing, juicy tomatoes, warm spices — that the chickpeas act as one of many backup singers, and not the main vocals.
3. Skillet Greens With Runny Eggs, Peas and Pancetta
If you have a moment to get organized the day you plan to make this, take the eggs out of the refrigerator a few hours in advance: It will be much easier to cook them just to the point where they make an unctuous sauce for the other ingredients.
4. Korean Barbecue-Style Meatballs
The savory glaze that forms on the outside of these meatballs means that you have a tasty sauce for rice ready when they’re cooked, which takes only 15 minutes. A leafy green stir-fried with ginger is all you need to add; or just kimchi, if you have it.
