Hello and welcome to Five Weeknight Dishes, recipes for busy people who still want something good to eat. We have reached a milestone: There are now more than 1 million subscribers to this newsletter, 1 million of us who are on this shared journey to cook our way through this crazy time.
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Let’s harness the power of 1 million home cooks. I want to funnel your ideas and expertise about cooking to the group more frequently. What are you having for dinner lately? How have you been managing? Is cooking right now a salve or a slog, or both? (Maybe it’s always been both salve and slog.) Send me thoughts, and I can share some of them back out: [email protected].
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Here are five dishes for the week:
1. Weeknight Chicken Marbella
Rick A. Martinez took a much-loved recipe from “The Silver Palate Cookbook” and made it possible to cook on a weeknight — a brilliant move for which we are grateful. Studded with olives, capers and prunes, this is an exceptional chicken dinner.
View this recipe.
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2. Linguine With Crisp Chickpeas and Rosemary
I love a starch-on-starch recipe. This one, by Ali Slagle, is especially good because of the fragrant rosemary, which is fried in olive oil and tossed with the beans and pasta to finish. If you add greens to the pan, you’ve got a one-pot dinner.
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3. Roasted Butternut Squash With Lentils and Feta
Some people greet fall with obscene quantities of apples; for me, it’s butternut squash. This recipe by Nik Sharma is filling enough to be dinner, though it would be delicious with roasted chicken thighs. (Put bone-in thighs, seasoned and brushed with oil, in a separate pan, and place them in the oven alongside the squash. They’ll cook in roughly the same amount of time.)
4. Korean Barbecue-Style Meatballs
Kay Chun’s meatball recipes are so great and are some of the fastest ways I know to make an excellent weeknight dinner. This one starts with the flavors of Korean barbecue and exports them to a meatball that bakes in 15 minutes. Good for kids. Triple this recipe: The meatballs freeze well.
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5. Crisp Gnocchi With Brussels Sprouts and Brown Butter
Here’s another dish from Ali Slagle, this one with five stars and 4,717 ratings as of this writing. Both the brussels sprouts and potato gnocchi are seared in the pan, which makes everything about this profoundly satisfying recipe easy, from prep, to cooking, to cleanup.
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