Weeknights can be tough dinner nights. Weeknights when you try to squeeze the gym in after work? Even tougher. 

Every cook has them: the meals we turn to when we are busy, sad, stressed, or just too damn lazy to cook a real dinner. But what is a real dinner anyway? In the midst of a bustling week, sometimes there is nothing more dependable, more real, than sitting down and eating a simple, satisfying meal that you managed to pull together in under 15 minutes. Here are my five favorite ways to feed myself well with almost no work.

Living alone or as a couple can prove to be a challenge come dinner time. When a recipe serves six but there's only two of you, it can be a bore to eat the same thing several days in a row. This is why I wanted to write a recipe today that was the perfect size: a hearty dinner salad just for two.

When Cambria asked Faith and myself for some help coming up with a main course for her Spring Vegetarian Dinner Party for Six, at first we couldn't decide. Faith thought it should be creamy and green. Cambria wanted a vegetarian dish that wasn't just another platter of pasta. I advocated for something satisfying and hearty, but still light enough for a spring meal. The final vote was unanimous: a pureed soup of peppery spring watercress served with warm goat cheese dumplings. Done and done. This recipe is a winner.

Hello! Erin from The Forest Feast here, bringing you the second recipe in my series of Farmers Market Feasts for the month of May. There is a fantastic little seasonal farmers market that recently began down the road from me in the mountains. I try to go every week, and I've been getting to know the farmers, which is fun! This week I picked up some green garlic and fresh basil to make a creamy avocado pesto.

As the weather warms up, turning on the oven to roast a pan of vegetables stops being an option, but that doesn't mean you have to spend the next five months eating green salads or steamed broccoli. Instead, look to your grill — or a stovetop grill pan — to quickly transform vegetables into soft, smoky, irresistibly summery versions of themselves. Carrots are one of my favorites on the grill, their charred, sweet flavor needing just a squeeze of lemon and some fresh herbs to become a simple but surprising side dish.

A green salad may sound too light to serve as a main dinner dish, but it can become quite substantial and filling when rounded out with other ingredients like avocado, cheese, a little meat, or some grilled vegetables. These 10 salads all make satisfying dinners, particularly if you want to keep things light and easy. Another tip? Bring your salad outside and enjoy the warm weather with a glass of rosé or white wine!

If you're feeling a little uninspired lately, you aren't alone — we call it the springtime slump. It seems to peak around dinnertime, when the contents of our fridges and pantries just look so...boring. Injecting a new recipe or two into the repertoire just doesn't seem to cut it. Instead, we're here with a whole week of weeknight-friendly dinner menus, with options for vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free eaters, too. Ready to shake up your weekly dinner rotation?

I grew up in a household of musical-lovers. My sisters and mother and I spent hours snuggled up under blankets on the couch, watching Singing in the Rain and Brigadoon and other classics. One of our favorites was a 1935 piece of sparkling fluff called Naughty Marietta, with Jeanette MacDonald as a French princess who flees an loathsome marriage — all the way to the New World, where she meets the handsome Nelson Eddy, a militia captain who of course falls for her bubble-headed charm. 

Where is this going, and what does it have to do with roasted vegetables? There is a punchline in Naughty Marietta we loved to quote, giggling, where the practical captain indignantly instructs the princess in disguise, who has no idea how to cook a meal: "You don't cook a radish, you eat it alive!" Sorry, dear Nelson — you could sing the moon out of the sky, but you didn't know too much about radishes. 

One of the most exciting sections of the upcoming Kitchn Cookbook is the up-close-and-personal tours of ten kitchens. This week I revisited several of our subjects to do follow-up interviews. Bridget, who lives on New York's Upper West Side, has been an empty nester for over ten years and she's great at cooking for one. I asked her for some of her favorite homemade-for-one dishes and she immediately told me about a chicken dish with red onions and lemon that her daughter Zoe taught her. "There's something about red onions," she said, "I think they have drugs in them."