Save These Summery 20-Minute Dinners
It’s easy to gush over summer food, to feel grateful for the generous produce and farmers that have eased our cooking lives. Thank you for the juicy spills of tomatoes and stone fruit, for the smell of basil leaves and melon rinds and for all the color and crunch.
I’m also sentimental for the staccato sounds and movements of cooking at this time of year. The chop-chop-chopping. Sizzles. Searing. As Labor Day weekend, the unofficial end of summer, gets closer and my recipe-development docket fills with Thanksgiving dishes and holiday cookies, the stirring of steamy pots and hoisting of heavy sheet pans have started again — and I’m not ready.
So this week’s newsletter is my scrapbook of the season. All of the recipes memorialize the speed and style of warm-weather cooking — each takes around 20 minutes — but don’t rely on fleeting summer produce. In the dead of winter, when you’re nostalgic for brighter times, return to these recipes for dinner.
1. Chilaquiles Verdes
If you use store-bought salsa verde and tortilla chips, Bryan Washington’s chilaquiles verdes are achievable for even the most weary and hangry. The combination of tart tomatillo and crispy-gone-soggy chips with juicy onion and cilantro and runny sour cream and eggs amounts to so much more than a hasty dinner solution.
2. Shrimp Bathed in Olive Oil and Lemon
Here, cooked shrimp luxuriate in a pool of creamy olive oil and sharp lemon juice until they’re relaxed and sweet and ready for your dinner. For a more substantial meal, let cooked white beans, mushrooms or vegetables like green beans or broccoli go for a dip, too. There will be plenty of olive oil, lemon and shrimp juices to go around, so be ready with bread or drizzle the mix over a salad of romaine lettuce or arugula.
3. Thai Larb Gai (Chicken With Lime, Chili and Fresh Herbs)
The dish that has taught me the most about combining flavors and harnessing the potential of ingredients is larb gai. The dish I make the most is larb gai. Each time I go to this recipe from Kwan Bellhouse (adapted by Julia Moskin), I’m in awe, again, of its brilliance in composition. How can it be so good?
4. Cumin and Cashew Yogurt Rice
Priya Krishna’s cumin and cashew yogurt rice is hot and cool, creamy and crunchy — and if you’ve ever wanted to eat rice pudding for dinner, here’s your chance. All you need to do is coat cooked rice with yogurt and, excitingly, raw ginger, and then pour over it hot butter speckled with cashews, chiles and spices.
5. Sardines on Buttered Brown Bread
One of my favorite moments in summer cooking is when I take out my scissors and give a haircut to a handful of herbs, letting the trimmings land on whatever I’m making. I do this with David Tanis’s sardines on buttered brown bread, a light but substantial meal because of the dark and dense bread, a generous frosting of butter, meaty sardines and those snips of dill and chives. While tomatoes are around, follow Melissa Clark’s lead and add a few slices.
We wrote a cookbook! “Easy Weeknight Dinners: 100 Fast, Flavor-Packed Meals for Busy People Who Still Want Something Good to Eat” comes out on Oct. 8. Preorder it now, and if you’d like a signed edition, click here.
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