Recipe Roundups & Menu Ideas

The moment we’ve waited all-year long for has finally returned: welcome to strawberry season! Endless tables at the market stacked high with those blue or green pint containers of sweet, fresh strawberries are a defining quality of delicious late spring and early summer. The first order of business at the start of the season is to savor fresh strawberries piece by piece, or maybe lightly macerated in sugar and spooned over some homemade whipped cream.

Let us know which recipe you’d like to make first!

These are guaranteed to steal the show.

Make your Easter morning delicious!

As we inch closer and closer to spring, we’re dreaming of the warmer weather to come, and days spent outdoors. While we know that we might not be able to celebrate in all the ways that we normally would, we can still welcome the lighter, brighter days in smaller ways — perhaps by baking something so full of lemons and sunshine that you can’t help but feel a bit cheerier. Is there anything that screams spring more than lemon-y sweet treats?

When it comes to holiday hams, whether it’s a Bourbon-Glazed Ham or a Copycat Honey Baked Ham, there are always, always leftovers. Yes, even if you’ve done your research on how to cook a ham and made estimates based on how many people you’re feeding. But honestly, leftover ham dishes can be even tastier than the centerpiece itself. There are plenty of ways — big and small — that we all can use leftover ham, now and later.

I love brunch, you love brunch — I think we’re all on board for a good weekend brunch, yes? The one problem with brunch, however, is figuring out how to make it without having to get up at the crack of dawn to start cooking. That’s why we’re bringing you a roundup of all our favorite make-ahead brunch recipes for whatever plans you may have come the weekend.

Ever make something amazing for dinner, then two months later, when you’re in a cooking rut forget all about it? Or, you’re seriously craving chocolate chip cookies, but get overwhelmed by the thousands of recipes you can choose from. Same and same. Sometimes, we all just want someone else to tell us what to make. Enter: The Kitchn Keepers. The Kitchn Keepers is a collection of 13 of our favorite recipes — ever.

If you’re starting to plan your Easter menu, we’ve got you covered with easy and classic Easter dinner recipes to get you started. If you’ve already got dinner (or brunch) worked out, then you just need a dessert or two for the Easter table — they’ll add to the decor just as much as dyed Easter eggs will. Easter desserts are some of the best. Seasonally, you get to combine the last citrus fruits of winter and the first fresh berries of spring.

Ham is one of my favorite things to serve as a main dish. I’ll either cook my ham in the slow-cooker or bake it in the oven. I love that it’s easy to make and provides the perfect savory foundation to build the rest of your dinner around. In my opinion, a large part of the pleasure of serving ham is enjoying the side dishes that play well with its rich flavor. Plus, leftover ham can be reinvented into several other meals throughout the week or frozen until further notice.

Whether you plan to serve roasted leg of lamb, pan-seared lamb chops, or grilled lamb chops for a special dinner, you’ll want to choose some sides. The beauty of serving lamb as the main is that you can serve it with a wide variety of sides and the meal will taste great. Hearty potatoes dishes pair just as well as bright snappy veggies like green beans.

In the past, I’ve reserved lamb for special occasions. While roasted leg of lamb is absolutely worthy of such, pan-seared lamb chops, lamb burgers, or lamb meatballs deserve to be everyday affairs. They are just as easy to cook as pork, chicken, or beef, but come with a rich and savory flavor that can’t be beat.While lamb is great on its own, it’s even better served with a sauce — be it creamy or herby.

If you’re buying a big bone-in ham for the holidays this year, consider this your friendly reminder that you’ll be left with a tasty ingredient after all the meat’s been picked off: The ham bone. So, whatever you do, don’t toss it in the compost bin or trash. Ham bones are packed with so much rich, smoky flavor. Don’t have time to put the ham bone to use right away? No problem, just freeze the bone, as you would any other meat bones and food scraps.

We’ve done the math.

The beauty of making brunch the center of any celebration, such as Easter or Mother’s Day, are the sheer variety of options. From hearty brunch casseroles, stacks of pancakes and French toast, and cinnamon rolls, the best brunch spreads have a little bit of everything. But let’s not forget the appetizers!Bite-sized mini quiches, breakfast sliders, and sweet mini Dutch baby pancakes are great options, along with classic deviled eggs, creamy dips, and puff pastry tarts.

If there’s one thing harder than deciding what to make yourself for dinner, it’s coming up with easy dinner ideas for your family. You want to get something on the table that’s fairly quick to make and doesn’t require a lot of effort. And you also want a meal that the kids (and ideally the whole table!) will devour, while contending with food preferences that can ping-pong from week to week. And it can feel even trickier when you have a picky eater on your hands.

When it comes time to plan your Easter menu, a glazed ham or a big roast leg of lamb is the default. These dishes are classics for sure, but they’re far from the only options, especially if, like mine, your celebration will be on the small side this year. But what to make? Pork tenderloin or pork chops can be easily dressed up with a sauce or simple glaze.

Cabbage is the unsung kitchen hero. Some people wait until St. Patrick’s Day rolls around to make it, but cabbage is delicious any time of the year! And it’s one of the most versatile vegetables in your arsenal. Let’s start with a quick refresher: When it comes to buying a head of cabbage, you’ve got some choices.

Not just lasagna.

Corned beef and cabbage is the classic St. Patrick’s Day food that many of us make every year. Our slow cooker corned beef and cabbage is the absolute best and easiest version because it’s hands-off and fuss-free. Plus if you have leftovers, you can make corned beef hash for breakfast the following day!

Which one will you make first?

Oh, man, homemade meatloaf is amazing. I love this savory, flavorful, home-warming dish so much (the crispy bits! The ketchup glaze!) that sides are often an afterthought. When I think about what to serve with meatloaf, I’ll typically head straight for a pair of standbys: mashed potatoes and a side of green veggies ( like broccoli or green beans). But those are far from the only — or the best — dishes to pair with this perennial protein.

Quick! What’s the first meal that comes to mind when you think of ground beef? For me it’s grilled burgers or crunchy tacos that I used to eat as a kid. But those two foods barely scratch the surface of all the different dinners you can cook up with some ground beef. Arm yourself with a pack of ground beef and the sky’s the limit when it comes to dinner possibilities.

There are some dinners that you just know are going to be automatic wins. Chili is absolutely one them. When chili night falls into your meal plan, you can expect a dinner that’s warming, hearty, and filling. Sure, a Dutch oven loaded with chili is certainly meal-worthy all on its own, especially when it’s packed with beans, meat, or a combination, but I always think having one simple side is the ticket to rounding out dinner. Serving chili with a side dish balances the table.

No reservations required.

They’re the real MVP of your party.

If you’re not already slotting steak into your meal plan once in a while, I’m here to encourage you to do just that, be it Valentine’s day, a date night at homesteak fajita saladsirloin steak sandwichWhether you fire up the grill or sear it in a skillet along with potatoes, getting steak on the table during the week is a totally doable affair. In fact, it can seem intimidating, but a really good steak dinner is a lot faster and easier to cook up than you might think.

During Valentine’s Day, there’s no better way to show appreciation for your loved one – whether that’s your spouse, significant other, best friend, or even (especially) yourself – than to spend quality time with them over a special at-home dinner. You don’t have to spend all day to cook a romantic dinner.

Like every holiday in Louisiana, Mardi Gras is all about the food. While Fat Tuesday itself is just one day, celebrations and parades go on for weeks beforehand in New Orleans and other cities. Mardi Gras is the time of festivity and feasting leading up to Lent (the 40-day period of fasting and abstaining before Easter Sunday) so it’s customary to celebrate with pull-out-the-stops meals and plenty of King Cake.

Scallops are one of my very favorite special-occasion dinners. They don’t come cheap, so my husband and I save them for celebratory meals, which makes them feel like a luxury when we do sit down to them. The best part? Whether they’re pan-seared scallops, baked scallops, grilled scallops, or air-fried scallops, they take practically no time to cook. That leaves you with time to focus on preparing a side or two to round out your meal.

Every year the impending arrival of the Super Bowl incites a parallel culinary sport: churning out new recipes for chicken wings, different versions of creamy dips, and other easy appetizers. February calls for seven-layer dip, nachos, and hot wings. It’s the one Sunday I dispense with the hummus and bask in the glory of bacon-wrapped jalapeño poppers. (Or bacon-wrapped anything.

Whether you prefer dark and rich or smooth and creamy, there is almost no other ingredient as intrinsically linked to romance as chocolate. While Valentine’s Day marketing helped drive this association home (and still does), the relationship between love and chocolate has been around for much longer than Valentine’s Day. Throughout history, chocolate and cocoa were consumed as a tonic for health and vitality — which, of course, fed romances too.

Which one will you make first?

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this, but it’s pretty much a fact that if at least one dip is present when watching the Super Bowl, it’s always the first dish to get wiped clean. Whether you’re hosting people or keeping things low-key, a great dip should absolutely be in your plans, no matter how many of you it is gathered around the television.

Call on Ina if you need a simple, easy, and accessible solution for a delicious breakfast, lunch, dinner, drink, or dessert. She’s also a massive vibe, inspiring the likes of the Coastal Grandmother movement and the dreamy culinary scenes that have become one and the same with Nancy Meyers movies.

On their own, baked potatoes are one of the absolute best foods. They’re cheap, filling, and require practically zero effort to make. All you really need is salt, pepper, and a pat of butter. You could be satisfied — no, delighted — by this simplest of preparations. But let us indulge, if you will, in what a humble baked potato could become.You don’t even need a recipe.

Comforting soups like lemon orzo chicken soup and creamy corn soup, plus one-skillet dinners were among the favorites.

It takes almost zero effort.

If you’re following the Mediterranean diet, you know you should be loading your plate with good-for-you ingredients, from side dishes like roasted root vegetables and farro salad to dinners like salmon, spinach, and chickpeas. But what about breakfast? Fruit, dairy, and whole grains play a big role in the diet, so there’s actually a lot of tasty (and satiating) breakfast options to choose from. Here are 25 Mediterranean diet breakfast recipes to inspire you.

Anytime you find yourself with leftover baked chicken breasts, shredded chicken from the slow cooker, poached chicken breasts, or whole roasted chicken, consider it a very good thing. You can certainly go for a second round of last night’s dinner, but the wonderful thing about chicken is that it’s so easy to repurpose it into an entirely different meal.

Her "Stampede Soup" is legendary.

Quick and easy.

If you were to glimpse into my freezer at any given moment, I guarantee you’d find a pound or two of uncooked sausage inside. Hot Italian sausage is my preference — either ground sausage sold in bulk or as links — but really, no matter the variety, ground sausage makes delicious quick and easy dinners. It’s so packed with seasoning that you hardly need to do much to turn it into a meal.

We love a classic lasagna, although we’ve never met a lasagna we didn’t like! Whether it’s an extra-cheesy white lasagna, a gnocchi lasagna, or a skillet ravioli lasagna, it’s the ultimate family dinner because it feeds everyone and it feeds everyone well.What to serve with lasagna, though? It’s usually packed with enough good things like cheese, meat, and even veggies to make it totally satisfying all on its own.

Steak isn’t an everyday dinner, so when you take the time to cook it, it truly feels like an occasion. It’s often made to celebrate special occasions like birthdays and anniversaries, but it also has a way of making a random Wednesday night feel festive. It’s hard to beat a perfectly grilled steak when it’s warm outside.

The Mediterranean diet is all about moderation, which means dessert is hardly out of the question. Ingredients such as fresh fruit, olive oil, and yogurt are staples when it comes to sweets, resulting in desserts that are light, fresh, and full of flavor. Like so much of Mediterranean cooking, desserts are rarely complicated, often coming together in one bowl with just a few ingredients. Here are 15 of our favorite Mediterranean dessert recipes.

A bread bowl is the ultimate Libra flex.

Mac and cheese is such a solid staple. You can make macaroni & cheese from scratch, find a favorite boxed variety, or go for pure nostalgia with the frozen kind that microwaves in minutes. While some might argue that mac and cheese is an entire meal (my second grader, for one), even on the most harried nights I still want a side dish to round out the table. So, what goes with mac and cheese? Side dishes for mac and cheese can be as easy as carrot sticks or a bagged salad.

Truly, pasta doesn’t need much to make it a crowd favorite at the dinner table. Grab a bowl and a fork and you’re pretty much all set. However, it never hurts to add a salad or cooked vegetable to the situation to make the whole meal feel a bit more, well, whole. Serving up pasta for dinner is actually a golden opportunity to get some extra vegetables on the table. And as for the very best pasta side dishes, know that the options are vast.

I am not sure which is more tried-and-true when it comes to weeknight cooking: a trusty skillet dinner or crowd-pleasing chicken. It really doesn’t matter, though, because if you bring the two together you have easy eating at its very best. Take your pick between bone-in or boneless thighs, lean chicken breasts, or even whole chicken, because they’re all fair game in these chicken skillet recipes.

I was first introduced to the wonders of bone broth when I experimented with a round of Whole30 last winter. After sipping on a warm mug of this rich, flavor-packed broth, I was instantly smitten and soon learned all the ways to work it into my meal plans. The good news is that there’s no need to search specifically for recipes using bone broth.

One-pan meals are a busy person’s dream come true. Just as with recipes that call for only a few ingredients, you can trust that those requiring just a single piece of cookware are going to be quick to assemble and quick to cook. Plus, you won’t be left with a giant pile of dirty dishes afterwards.

Often, when I don’t feel like cooking, I’ll make a dinner salad, a plate of scrambled eggs and toast, or a quick beans-and-greens sauté and call it a night. But come winter I crave dinners that are way more comforting than that. When I’m looking for something to warm me from the inside out — something that is as hearty as they come — I turn to these recipes.

There are no shortage of ways to cook up a really great chicken dinner, and one of my absolute favorite ways is in the slow cooker. That’s right — your slow cooker isn’t just for big, tough cuts of meat. It’s also perfect for cooking up tender, juicy chicken. Whether you’re starting with a pack of meaty chicken thighs, lean chicken breasts, or even a whole chicken, your slow cooker is the secret to turning it into an easy, family-friendly dinner.

It always feels like a treat when salmon is in my dinner lineup. I love it because it’s easy to prepare and there are so many ways to cook it. Take your pick between cooking salmon in the oven, under the broiler for an extra-speedy dinner, or on the grill. You can even cook salmon straight from the freezer.The best side dishes for salmon should be simple enough to make while the salmon cooks, and deliver plenty of flavor without outshining the beautiful fish.

Cheers!

When the craving strikes, we got you.

Dessert recipes for everyone.

Countertop air fryers are an increasingly popular kitchen gadget. Air fryers work by circulating super-hot air, which quickly and evenly reaches all the surfaces of the food. In other words, it gives food that crispy-fried texture and golden-brown color without having to actually deep-fry anything. If you’ve joined the air fryer club and need some ideas for meal essentials, we’ve got you covered. You can make practically anything that you would fry in an air fryer.

There's nothing more comforting on a cold winter night.