This is my favorite thing to eat a big bowl of on a drafty, winter weeknight (yes, oversized pajamas are involved). Consider it less of a recipe, and more of an idea for how you can get a cozy, warming bowl of green curry and noodles on the table quickly. (Stock up on curry paste.) This is my favorite version, with deeply seared mushrooms, soft butternut squash, and sauce-soaked broccoli stalks, but you can't go wrong with most vegetables or proteins here. Feel free to mix up aromatics, too—the important ones are already in the curry paste, so anything you want to sauté up front is just creating flavor upside. Don't stress if you forget to grab scallions—feel free to swap in a diced onion. The oversized pajamas are also optional, but highly recommended.

I've been making these potatoes for years and love to serve them with slow-roasted Greek chicken. The olives mellow out with the long roasting time.

Quesadillas are a quintessential back-pocket recipe you can pull out when a dinner emergency strikes. But as much as we all love Tex-Mex, it’s nice to have a change of pace sometimes. One run-of-the-mill day, I came up with these Florentine-inspired quesadillas. They’re stuffed with whatever chicken you have on hand (from the local rotisserie or from your freezer stash) and made healthier with plenty of spinach and artichoke hearts. Cream cheese and Parmesan create a melty inside to contrast with the crisped outside. You can tailor them to even the pickiest eaters (trust me, I have a few). If you have persnickety little ones, too, just pull out the artichoke hearts. And yes, you can keep those extra artichokes all to yourself!

Meet my new favorite go-to weeknight dinner. It's saucy, flavorful, fresh, and it comes together in about half an hour. I developed these chicken and lettuce wraps while on Whole 30, so they fit that bill if you need 'em to. Or, feel free to swap the toppings for anything you like—crispy rice would be wonderful. So would almost any herb, pickle, or thinly sliced vegetable. Winner, winner, braised-chicken-thigh dinner.

Sure, we can technically call these granola bars because they’re made of oats and nuts and cut into rectangles, but in practice they’re more like the crumbly top layer of a fruit crisp, made into a sandwich cookie. And despite their hunky granola-like ingredient list and a near absence of technique, they have the lightness of a fine, sandy shortbread cookie. I suspect this is due to the unusual addition of flour and a little more butter than usual, and because pastry chef Karen DeMasco really knows what she’s doing.

When friends come over at the last minute, I pop open a few cans and jars to make this back-pocket salad. What might seem like a cop-out to dried bean devotees, members of Artichoke-Turners Anonymous, and captains of the health patrol is actually a damn good dish that comes together in minutes and requires zero time at the stove. It’s also an important reminder that while fresh vegetables are best, eating vegetables of any kind is important. Plus, these preserved products pass my pantry purge test with flying colors. The key to reviving them is not holding back on lemon, so squeeze on even more than you think you’ll need.

For most drinkers, classic cocktails serve as craving benchmarks. When it’s sweater weather and you’ve got whiskey on the brain? Make it a Manhattan. When you’re roasting in the midsummer sun and in desperate need of refreshment? Send margaritas. The trouble is, our benchmarks tend to clock in above the mark where they can reasonably be dubbed sessionable. The good news is they can easily be altered to bring down the ABV while still preserving the flavor profiles that made these drinks classics in the first place.

A soft, flavorful quick bread that's a touch more exciting than banana, but with the same ease. Garnish with sliced kiwis on top, if you'd like.

This recipe is shared in partnership with Smithfield Marinated Fresh Pork.

This dressing is perfect for fresh salads. If you like, add less water to make it more of a sauce.

The is a recipe for those times when you find the world’s best-looking tomato and you’re so excited to eat it, you don’t even have the patience to close your sandwich before taking a bite. It celebrates heavy-handed mayonnaise application, yolky dregs, and flaky salt.

This classic French recipe is the ultimate comfort food. It's creamy mashed potatoes mixed with rich, melty cheese. The consistency of these potatoes is exceptionally fun—when they're ready to serve, the aligot should stretch and pull almost like melted mozzarella cheese. Comté and Emmental are the featured cheeses in this recipe, but you can use any semi-firm, Alpine-style cheese. Also, feel free to make the mashed potatoes ahead of time, and then reheat them and add the cheese at the last moment before serving. Just use a little tap water to help reheat the mashed potatoes before adding the cheese.

Still crazy good after all these years. Simple to make and goes down easy.

No starter required in these bright almond-flavored treats: they make the cake in pancake obvious. Serve with citrus jams, powdered sugar, and/or whipped cream.

Choose an olive oil that’s not too mild and buttery, yet not too robust and peppery.

It’s always great to have a couple of impressive dinner dishes that you can throw together for a party or feed to a crowd without having to do a lot of dishes. This baked fish recipe is perfect for an impromptu gathering. It’s basically a one-dish meal—everything (including cooking the lentils) is done in one pan. You can switch up the cod for whatever fish is local and in season, keeping in mind the cooking time might change depending on the thickness of the fish, so check it accordingly while cooking.