Weeknight Kitchen

Fresh Pacific halibut is a seasonal splurge. It needs very little to enhance its flavor—in fact, it’s almost a sin to fuss too much with it. I like to prepare it simply: pan-seared until golden and crisp with a quick sauté of sweet, garlicky cherry tomatoes on the side. Depending on how long you cook the tomatoes, they can be firm and fresh or soft and jammy. I usually aim for somewhere right in between, but they’re delicious either way.

Often, I have a bit of chicken left over from dinner that I use up the next day for lunch. Here is a really delicious summer version, using fresh-cooked chicken breasts; obviously, you can swap in leftover roast chicken.

If you’ve never had a bánh mì, it is a Vietnamese sandwich, typically made with salty-sweet marinated pork. It’s tangy, too, from the pickled radishes and carrots, and spicy from the jalapeños. It’s all of my favorite flavors housed between a crusty baguette. I’ve turned this classic sandwich into a lighter, plant-forward salad, fusing in a Tex-Mex avocado crema as the dressing. The honey–soy sauce roasted chickpeas, used in place of the pork, are good on their own as a snack. This salad takes a bit of work when done in a single breadth, but most of it can be made ahead, like the Quick-Pickled Radishes and Carrots, the croutons, and even the Avocado Crema. When prepped in advance, dinner takes no time at all to throw together and tastes this good. 

I am not sure that I want to live in a world where ranch dressing is more beloved than Green Goddess, which is superior in both name and taste, so I’m doing everything in my power to bring this vibrant, herb-packed green dressing into the limelight. Green Goddess is a kitchen MVP. It can be used as a salad dressing, yes, but it’s also a dip for crudités, a marinade for grilled chicken, and, if you’re one of the weirdos who like to do this, it’s great on pizza or with French fries too. For this super-green salad, I combine crunchy romaine, cucumbers, snap peas, green onions, and avocado, then douse it with the irresistible dressing.

Ask the fishmonger to cut the grouper into 1-inch cubes for you and remove the shells and veins from the shrimp. You’ll want to purchase clams that are the same size so that they cook evenly. Adding the clams to the stock while it comes to a boil helps speed up the process.

It takes only five minutes to cook pork cutlets into perfect schnitzel. With only a handful of ingredients, a crisp and bright salad of cucumbers with dill and yogurt is a simple accompaniment to the meal.

Directions

Fresh salmon is cut into bite-sized chunks and skewered with alternating slices of fresh lemon. They are given a quick grill and then finished with a fresh basil vinaigrette.

Growing up, I was always served collards prepared the same way: some kind of pork and stock, with maybe a tomato, some onions, and always cooked until they were dark olive-green. I love collards and, like all other greens, want them to be a bright color and have some texture. This quick, simple recipe highlights that strong collard funkiness and tastes deceptively rich for a vegetarian dish.

We strongly recommend that you bake the beetroot [Ed. note, beets in North America] for this recipe according to the instructions below – baked beetroot have a stronger flavour, deeper colour and a denser, crunchier texture. Having said that, you could use boiled and it will still taste really nice. We use regular purple beetroot, but do try multicoloured ones if you wish. And if you don’t have time to make the labneh, you could use a smear of oat crème fraîche.