Five weeknight dinner-lunches
Hello! Mia here, cannonballing in for Emily today. Are we all staying cool? Drinking our water? Excellent. My meal prep philosophy isn’t so much a philosophy as it is basic multiplication. I simply make a lot of something, usually doubling the recipe (the handy scaling feature in the app can do the math for you) so that I can eat it for lunch the following day or two. Simple enough, right? But there’s one caveat: The leftovers must be good whether eaten room temperature or cold. This is because a) I don’t have a microwave and b) even if I did, by the time lunch rolls around, I’m usually too hungry and impatient to wait for something to reheat. So today I thought I’d share some of my favorite easy, quick dinners that make even easier, quicker lunches. (Though if you’d like to heat up those leftovers, please do!)
1. Tofu Scramble With Black Beans and CornIf this Hetty Lui McKinnon banger were a piece of clothing, it would be a little black dress — it’s so versatile (I like it for Sunday breakfast as much as I like it for Monday dinner) and fun to accessorize (Hot sauce! Sliced avocado! Fried eggs!). And it would also be on sale, as this dish is easy on the budget. I love eating leftovers with tortilla chips as a sort of protein-packed cousin to cowboy caviar.
2. Paprika Chicken and PotatoesBefore you ask, yes, I like cooked potatoes cold. (See: potato salad.) Come to think of it, if you gave the leftover chicken and potatoes a lazy chop, and then mixed them with the leftover smoked-paprika-infused mayonnaise, you’d have a pretty great patatas-bravas-y potato salad. We can thank Yasmin Fahr for this five-star, 10,000-reviews-plus winner.
3. Broccoli-Walnut Pesto PastaI’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve scarfed this Genevieve Ko pasta straight from its container, the open fridge door beeping at me to shut it already. It’s perfect hot, that luscious broccoli-garlic purée brightened with mint and lemon, and it’s also satisfying cold, like a very green pasta salad. Note that the broccoli pesto might oxidize after a day and shift into more of a khaki green color, which I like to camouflage with even more chopped walnuts.
4. Tomato Lentil Salad With Spicy TahiniA smart, streamlined new recipe from Ali Slagle, requiring only lentils (canned, for extra ease), tomatoes, olive oil, lemon, tahini, basil and your favorite chile-based condiment (chile crisp, harissa). I want to try this with freshly cooked lentils, only because I think the contrast of warm, nubby lentils with cool, juicy tomatoes will be really pleasing.
5. Roasted Zucchini and Shrimp With Za’atar YogurtSomething about eating cold cooked shrimp feels fancy to me — maybe it’s because I think of shrimp cocktail, the coldest and fanciest shrimp there is. Which is to say, I think this Melissa Clark five-star dish of roasted shrimp and zucchini paired with a garlicky salted yogurt sauce would bring a lot of class to a hurried, hunched-over lunch between meetings. For a limited time, you can enjoy free access to the recipes in this newsletter in our app. Download it on your iOS or Android device and create a free account to get started. Thanks for reading and cooking with me. If you like the work we do at New York Times Cooking, please subscribe! (Or give a subscription as a gift!) You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Previous newsletters are archived here. Reach out to my colleagues at cookingcare@nytimes.com if you have any questions about your account. View all recipes in your weekly plan.
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