Our Best Dinner Recipes & Ideas

Up until recently, I just assumed “the art of sandwich making” was better left to the professionals. I don’t mean the basics — like ham and cheese on white or a PB&J — but the more ornate ones, like French dips, Cubans, and spicy Italians. I guess I figured that perhaps a deli had access to top-secret restaurant ingredients, or at the very least better-quality meats and toppings.

A bowlful of brown rice, tempeh, kale, and other veggies has “health food” written all over it, but in our house we hardly think of this recipe as macrobiotic or vegan or anything else but satisfying. Brimming with the perfect balance of flavors and textures, it satiates the senses and even has my barbecue- and burger-loving guy requesting it for dinner.

My friend Aura is a very good cook. She lives in Florida with her husband, Leo, and two adorable (I do not use that word glibly) children. When I think of Aura’s cooking, I think of fruit salads, smoothies, and the freshest dishes from her native Guatemala — light, healthy, and driven by Florida’s tropical fruits and vegetables. So I was surprised, one winter evening a few years ago, to sit down at her table and find a big, bubbling casserole of chicken wrapped in bacon.

Yesterday Cambria shared a family recipe for African peanut stew, a celebratory dish made with beef, spices, and rich peanut butter. The classic side dish for this meal — and indeed, nearly any meal throughout much of eastern Africa — is sukuma wiki, braised greens with a very apt meaning to their name! Do you know what sukuma wiki means? A meal in Kenya, with ugali, chapati, a meat stew, and sukuma wiki.

Once upon a time long ago, a friend of mine told me she was doing a crazy thing called the Master Cleanse; for something like thirty days she consumed only a tonic made from water, lemon juice, cayenne pepper and maple syrup. This, of course, went down in California. Since then I’ve tried the Master Cleanse once, for three miserable days, and bombed.

A family recipe is important, even if we don’t remember all the parts, because each attempt at its re-creation keeps us connected to the people who helped shape us. It happens each time we do that intimate, life-sustaining cooking and eating thing, especially when we do it from a place of memory.

I’m a Los Angeles native, which means I have never owned a decent umbrella, I describe distances not in miles but in the number of minutes it takes to drive, and I believe sliced avocado belongs on a BLT. My first BLTA was probably at a diner — any Southern California diner worth its salt has at least an add-on avocado option for its BLT — and it was probably fine. It’s hard to go wrong with the combination of crisp lettuce, salty bacon, ripe tomato and avocado.

Last week we received a bunch of cute little eight-ball zucchini from our CSA. We thought of stuffingeggs baked inside pattypan squash We hollowed out each squash, filled the shell with a bit of tomato sauce and tangy goat cheese, topped it with an egg, and popped it in the oven until the yolk was just set and still creamy. We ate it with crusty bread for brunch, but it would also be delicious as a simple summer dinner.

Call me crazy, but when the weather heats up, I don’t feel like eating big hunks of meat. Slow and sluggish might work for winter when everyone is half-hibernating anyway, but in the summer, salads like this are what I want to eat — full of freshness and crunch, with a salty-tart lime dressing and just the right amount of juicy grilled steak.

“I’ll take a salmon BLT, hold the bacon, lettuce, and tomato. And as many extra lemon slices as you will give me.” Yep, that was my go-to lunch order at our favorite little hometown cafe. I was a very particular little kid. At least I ate the salmon, but thank goodness the times have changed!I just gifted my fiancé with a fabulous new natural gas grill for his 30th birthday. (Okay, I secretly bought it for me, too, but don’t tell him that.

Stir-fries aren’t usually the well-edited dishes you think about and shop for in advance. They are frequently renegade, use-up-what’s-in-the-fridge meals, which is part of their charm. But not so with this recipe. I chose these particular ingredients deliberately, picking up pork tenderloin for a mid-week treat and adding lots of fresh spring vegetables for crunch.

By now it’s probably safe to assume that you’ve heard of the famous Zuni Roast Chicken. Considering the viral nature of the food blogging world, who hasn’t?! I’ve tried it and it’s fabulous, but I’m not going to lie: I just don’t always have the time to put that much effort into dinner. (Please tell me I’m not the only one.) And while their chicken truly is a show-stopper, it’s the bread salad that really leaves me hankering for more.

Last week I spoke on a panel with my friend Melissa Clark at the International Association of Culinary Professionals conference in New York. The topic was recipe voice. As I was considering what I might say, I asked myself what it is that I hear when I read a recipe and what I want my readers to hear when I write one.

My parents visited Sicily last fall (lucky dogs!) and brought back a wonderful recipe to accompany any main dish at dinner. I’ve riffed on the combination of blood oranges, mint, and red onion and added my own spin. The results? Shockingly good in color and in flavor! For me the perfect salad is crucial to any supper. The lighter notes can take center stage as the base of the meal or they can play in contrast to something heavier.

Mardi Gras is on Tuesday. Do you have plans? We’ve got a fun, super easy recipe for an impromptu party—hot dogs! But they’re gussied-up hot dogs, boiled in a spicy broth and served with saucy onions.This recipe comes from chef David Guas, a New Orleans native who owns the Bayou Bakery in Arlington, Virginia. David says these spicy dogs are a classic Mardi Gras food; people serve them along the parade route or at parties.

Fair warning: You should only make these bread sticks when surrounded by plenty of people to help you eat them. Otherwise, there is a very serious danger of proceeding directly from the last bite of one bread stick to the first bite of the next. Especially if there’s a little bowl of tomato sauce for dipping and no one to stop you. I embarked on this mission of stuffing cheese inside bread thinking this would be easy-peasy. Wrap cheese in dough, bake, devour. Repeat.

There are very few foods that feed a large crowd with little effort. Tacos may be the simplest option for feeding a lot of people, and today we are bringing you one of our favorite taco stuffings: barbacoa beef, tender and full of rich, complex flavors. Yes, did you know you can make that tasty stuff you buy at Chipotle in your own kitchen — and in your slow cooker, no less? I have a serious thing for barbacoa.

I had the best Brussels sprouts of my life last week at a lovely little restaurant in Brooklyn called Vinegar Hill House. It was just before Thanksgiving and it got me thinking about the dwindling stock of green food coming from the earth this time of year. Winter eating can be depressing for a girl like me, but given the limits and challenges of cold-weather cooking, some pretty amazing stuff can pop through this kind of tabletop sorrow.

Plain mashed potatoes are great on their own, but sometimes you want to mix it up a bit. Mashing in other vegetables adds flavor, color and texture, transforming the usual bowl of starch into a totally new side dish. How about mashed potatoes with butternut squash or caramelized shallot and sage? Get these recipes and more ideas below!

This light creamy pasta comes together in fewer than 15 minutes and you’ll be amazed at its flavor. Bright lemon combines with deep garlic and a hint of heat to transform spinach, peas, and, of course, pasta. The key in this dish lies in simmering cream with garlic and red pepper flakes. It infuses the cream with deep flavor which cooks into the spinach as well. And what could be easier than throwing in a few frozen peas to add a little something extra?

Homemade macaroni and cheese is almost always a Good Thing, but is Martha Stewart’s recipe perhaps the best of all? Food52 has declared it a “genius recipe” One of the key elements is the mornay sauce that surrounds and permeates the pasta as it bakes. Flour, butter and milk are cooked into a béchamel to which grated sharp cheddar and Gruyere are added, resulting in a rich, creamy sauce that won’t break down during baking.

I am a big fan of Vij’s, an elegant and innovative Indian restaurant in Vancouver, BC. (We even gave you a peek inside Vikram Vij’s home kitchen!) The cookbooks by the owners of this restaurant are some of my favorite resources for Indian home cooking, and there was one recipe from their first book I had had bookmarked for a long time: A simple one of cabbage in yogurt curry. I finally made this, a few weeks ago, and I was blown away by its color! Hello, turmeric!

This, if you can’t tell, is an enormous zucchini. It’s the the type that shows up this time of year, somehow having hid beneath leaves all summer long until reaching proportions too gargantuan to ignore. There’s only one thing to do with a zucchini of this size: stuff it. This particular zucchini was bequeathed to me (as such things usually are) by a friend’s mother.

Like most Southerners, my earliest food memories come straight from my grandmother’s kitchen. It was in that Georgia kitchen I learned to make her famous chicken and dumplings. I vividly remember her digging a well in the flour and slowly mixing in the milk with her hand, then quickly rolling out the dough with the ease of a pro. Under her watchful eye, I was allowed to cut the dumplings into rectangles and plop them into the boiling water.

I cook for a big crowd of people at least once a week — sometimes twice. And lately I have been relying on the grill, since it doesn’t heat up the kitchen. But sometimes I get a little tired of grilling individual pieces of chicken, or individual burgers that have to watched and tended. It’s nice to have some bigger, simpler options. This pork loin is one of those: Slap it on the grill, walk away, come back, feed a crowd. Well, that is a little deceptive.

I am a big fan of kale salads and slaws. Kale has a hearty, long-lived texture that doesn’t go limp and soggy in the refrigerator, and its meaty taste stands up to the simple yet tangy lemon dressings I prefer. So when I saw this recipe from Kim Severson I promptly bought a bunch of kale and a block of ricotta salata. You should too: This stuff is delicious.When making a salad to go with dinner, I like to make a big batch and eat it for lunch for a couple days afterwards.