Putting together a week's worth of fast, healthy dinner ideas requires a fair amount of planning ahead. Otherwise, a typical weeknight dinner scenario might unfold like this:
3 p.m. Decide on a way-too-complicated recipe to make for dinner that night, because you have just had your afternoon snack and are feeling invincible.
6 p.m. Go the the grocery store and buy all the ingredients you need. This inevitably takes a full hour.
7 p.m. Come home, unpack the groceries, and start chopping things.
9 p.m. "OH MY GOD WHY AM I STILL DOING THIS I SHOULD HAVE JUST ORDERED THAI."
Why does this keep happening to us? And how do some people seem to have this all figured out? Over the years, our staffers have gathered an arsenal of tips and tricks we rely on to get nutritious and fast dinners on the table Monday through Friday without elaborate Sunday night preparations—read on for some of our favorites:
• Cook grains in large batches. It’s just as easy to make three cups of rice (or barley, or farro, or quinoa) as it is one, and it feels like a gift you’ve given yourself when you get home and open the fridge and realize you have something already prepared in there. Eat them on the side with a quick-cooking protein, use them to bolster a salad, or turn them into a late-in-the-week stir-fry. Oh, and let's not forget all of the fried rice options out there.
• Buy two or three bunches of herbs (cilantro, mint, parsley, basil) over the weekend and stem, wash, dry, and bag them while you're watching TV. It may take a couple of episodes of Bob's Burgers to get through, but during the week they'll be ready to give new life to beans, grains, salads, and virtually any leftovers in a flash. (These herbed chickpeas are the perfect emergency weeknight dinner.)
• Make a big batch of a condiment or sauce you love at the beginning of the week. Keep it in the fridge and put it on everything. Senior food editor Andy Baraghani makes a spicy lemony anchovy butter by smashing anchovies to a paste in a mortar and pestle, then stirring it into softened butter with some red pepper, lemon zest, and garlic. It goes with everything from slices of baguette or miche to pasta sauces to bitter greens.
• Keep a clean kitchen and your chances of making dinner when you walk through the door at night will be exponentially higher. When it comes to weeknight cooking, it’s the little psychological things that make a huge difference. If you're feeling especially motivated this weekend, try the 5-step deep clean.
• Buy a whole fish; it's the easiest (and fastest) way to make a weeknight dinner feel completely fancy. If you keep some lemons and herbs at home, all you need to do is go to the store and buy a cleaned fish (ask your fishmonger to do this for you). Then take it home, stuff it with thin slices of lemon and a handful of herbs, and roast it or toss it in a pan. Done. And yeah, some grocers even have pre-stuffed fish available, making the whole equation even easier.
• Get out of a rut by stocking up on ingredients that only feel fancy, but are actually really easy to cook. Instead of ground beef, try ground lamb. Throw it in a pan with some greens and garlic, then gussy it up with different spices, condiments, and grains throughout the week to make different meals quickly.
• Make a quick but substantive meal that can hang out in the fridge for a few days, like chicken salad. On late nights when the last thing you feel like doing is cooking, you can spoon it over pre-washed greens or stick it between two slices of bread and call it dinner.
• Keep sliced good bread in the freezer in a large, resealable freezer bag. Come dinnertime, pry off a couple of slices and stick them in the toaster. Eat with plenty of butter and scrambled eggs and ask yourself why you don't do this more often.
• Cook a pot of beans or lentils over the weekend and store them in a container in the fridge. Perhaps you also have a few sausage links in there as well, in which case, dinner is done.
• Keep interesting, ready-to-use spices within reach, like crushed coriander, fennel seed, cumin, turmeric, cinnamon, and ginger. Use a pinch of this and a pinch of that to give life to any meal. Pre-made spice blends like dukkah and za'atar are also good to have on call to add instant texture and flavor.
• Pick up a rotisserie chicken from the market or roast your own on Sunday. Spend a few minutes shredding the meat and storing it in a container in the fridge so you're only ever a few seconds away from chicken quesadillas, chicken and rice (with avocado and lime), creamy chicken salads, and more.
• Stock your pantry with good-quality canned proteins from the sea—think tuna, sardines, octopus, smoked mussels—and perhaps a jar of fancy peppers. Toast a few slices of that pre-frozen bread (see above), rub the toasted slices with a cut clove of garlic, and feast.
• Oh right, pasta. It goes without saying that you should have some in your pantry at all times, but change up your flavor profiles with these condiments that work surprisingly well as sauces. And if you haven't mastered the cacio e pepe-style sauce of super creamy (yet cream-less) pasta water/olive oil/parm, we highly recommend it.
• If you only have the mental energy to buy two things from the store, make them eggs and cheese. Digging into the omelet you've just made will be a reminder that life is good.
• Your freezer is your best friend. Keep building blocks such as shelled edamame, spinach, chopped scallions (because there are always too many in a bunch), tomato sauce, and ground beef in there. That way, you'll always have healthy ingredients to toss into pastas, stir fries, etc. There might also be a frozen pizza in there, but who's looking?
• Roast several kinds of root veggies (carrots, beets, sweet potatoes, parsnips) on a couple of baking sheets. Once you're tired of adding them to grain bowls and salads throughout the week, blend them into soup. For all your roasting needs, use this matrix.