Weeknight Dinners

I love beans for a lot of reasons, but my affection definitely derives from their price. Beans are cheap. Even the best beans are cheaper than almost anything else you can buy to eat. And they’re such a great reminder of how inexpensive cooking for yourself is, if you stay aware. Eliminate some of the frou frou trendy ingredients you see in the magazines, and notice, at the grocery store, that quinoa’s price has doubled (!), and you can feast almost every day for a couple of dollars per meal, a price that might allow for an occasional culinary splurge, whether in the kitchen or out.But it wasn’t long before I started loving beans for their taste and easy prep. Cooking up a pot from dried almost doesn’t feel like cooking, your pot’s just simmering there in the background, barely any of your attention needed to make all sorts of meals possible. If you’ve never made hummus from total scratch, that’s a great place to start with bean cookery.

I put a few things in with the beans when I cook them, most importantly olive oil, because it makes the beans creamy. Garlic, onion, and fennel also help add flavor. I’ll eat a bowl of freshly cooked beans with their broth and even more olive oil drizzled on top, and some breadcrumbs if I have them, and that humble bowl is what inspires this far less humble gratin.

That and mac ‘n cheese.

Here is your perfect weekly meal plan for $125.

Well, not exactly. I have a hard time believing that I can advise you what you want to eat for 14 dinners and lunches straight. There are cravings! And spontaneous weeknight plans! And people in your life with preferences and restrictions. Often, I think, a meal plan just can’t keep up with daily life. (That’s why this post is going to be a little long! If you’re interested in entering to win a $125 Whole Foods Market gift card, you should definitely make it to the end though.)

It starts and ends with the bread. The burger, I mean. The bun surrounding your juicy meats and creative toppings hits the mouth first (top bun) and last (bottom bun). And for good reason. Yes, the meat would seem to be everything, but the way it soaks into a mayo-smeared piece of bread before dripping off the bread and onto your fingers…Well, that is the experience I crave when I think about summer grilling burgers.

I plan on having two summer classics hog my repertoire this year: burgers (bet you could have guessed) and tacos. Both are well-suited to having company or cooking for two. And though we like to imagine we’re all spending summer evenings in front of the grill, sometimes we get stuck in the city with the same stove we’ve cooked on all winter. Both tacos and burgers are also good seasonal indoor food, if we really have to talk about that.

So, summer 2014 will be the season of the Torta Burger around here. A torta is a sandwich that contains many of the Mexican-style fixings you’d find on a taco-only now, they’re between the bun. Add in a burger, and you’ve got a glorious dinner for the season.

Here’s how I meshed the two dinners, tortas and burgers: I split open a Kaiser roll and toasted it quickly, just to get a nice golden-brown color in the inside. Then I started piling the extras onto the bottom: a spread of mayo, a spoonful of refried black beans.

Earlier in the day, I pickled a few sliced jalapeños. Pickling mellows the peppers and gives them the best spicy-sweet flavor and tender texture for burgers and sandwiches.

And then, I cooked burgers-cheeseburgers.

There’s such a premium on creative output these days, with an atmosphere of obsession over the new, the better, and the surprising. Sometimes, after all the pushing to come up with ideas, I stop being able to think of any more, and sometimes, when it comes to dinner, that means the usual.

Oh, let’s let the truth come out. I love cooking weeknight dinners. The joy of making the weeknight meal has less to do with food than with competition. There’s a race to see if I can satisfy our appetites with something good before we melt cheese on so many snack crackers that we have no appetites anymore (just like the walk to the subway is also a race, to see how many people, strollers, and puppies I can zig zag past and beat through the turnstile). Go, go, go.

Winning, of course, is eating, and this is what we eat. This humble mass of, well brown. Brown pasta. Brown sausage. Brown lentils. Brown-ish green kale. But it’s so good!

Beneath the brown, some reasoning. Though the ingredient list has nine lines, in fact this is a recipe of four elements: pasta, lentils, sausage, kale. A well-rounded meal of carbs, legumes, protein, and a vegetable. Wonderfully, you need very little else. There’s some lemon, some garlic, some onion, and some cilantro if you like, but at its core, this is so simple. One of those elements does play the leading role, and that’s the sausage. The links contribute all the seasoning Fleisher’s puts in sausages (these were merguez), and so you, as the weeknight cook, don’t have to worry so much about adding little bits of this and that seasoning, a strategic glitch that might slow you down, causing weeknight cooking defeat.

We have a lot of different chicken preferences in my family. White meat, dark meat, bone-in, skin on or off. Normally, I’d say that’s what roasting a whole chicken and dividing up parts are for, but there are some who don’t even like their meat juicy, so honestly, compromise is out.

But falling-apart chicken unites us. We’ve been raised on chicken soup and its offshoot, chicken fritz, for generations. But okay, so what is falling-apart chicken?

It’s a pot of chicken that’s been cooked forever, the chicken in the pot so tender you can fork over your knife. The too juicy problem certainly disappears with the long cooking time, but the chicken never gets dry, stewed as the pieces are in flavorful liquids like chicken broth, wine, and almond milk.

You could replace “falling-apart chicken” with chicken stew, chicken braise, or chicken tagine, if it helps. In some ways, Chicken Marbella qualifies as falling apart. Healthy Chicken Chili gets there too, as long as you help the process along by shredding the slow-cooked chicken thighs. Provencal Chicken Stew with Butternut Squash & Chickpeas is probably closest to a beloved childhood dish-the standard in falling-apart-chicken-only minus the butternut squash, the chickpeas, and the Provencal herbs.

So, that one was plain. But as we all grew older and less afraid of flavor, Coriander Chicken entered the dinner rotation. Flavored with a whole lot of onions, a bunch of cilantro (cooked til mellow, for all you haters), cilantro’s dried cousin-ground coriander-and raisins that grow plump as the chicken cooks and cooks and cooks, the dinner was a one-pot pleaser. Mom used yogurt as some of the liquid and kept the pot on the stove the whole time. I didn’t have her recipe on hand, so I improvised a delightful new version of it, using unsweetened almond milk to keep the stew safe for dairy-free Alex.