Your Dream Week of Healthyish Dinners
What do you feel like for dinner tonight? This is a question I ask myself every day around 3 p.m., and, usually, I come back to one of the same seven options—my favorite-of-all-time recipes from Bon Appétit, all of which happen to be healthyish. Give any of the following recipes a try if you’re looking for a new weeknight classic.
Photograph by Isa Zapata, Food Styling by Taneka Morris, Prop Styling by Tim Ferro1/7Slow-Roasted Salmon
Gentl & Hyers2/7Lamb Larb
People don't believe me when I tell them that I have cooked every single lamb recipe (that's a sampling!) that we've published in Bon Appétit since I started working here almost four years ago. But it's true! Lamb is my meat of choice. So it will come as little surprise that my favorite recipe from our February Healthyish issue is this lamb larb, a genius lettuce-cup situation via senior food editor Claire Saffitz. P.S. It also works beautifully with beef!
Photo by Marcus Nilsson3/7Green Goddess Cobb Salad
My life is a constant struggle to eat more salad. What I think of as "salad," though, typically entails all the essential components of a sandwich, minus the bread, plus a few leaves of lettuce. Hence my love for any iteration of the Cobb salad, especially this one, with its light, herby, yogurt-avocado dressing. This recipe calls for guanciale, which my neighborhood bodega definitely does not sell, but it does sell eggs, which, though not in the least bit similar to guanciale, are great soft-boiled and added to this salad.
Michael Graydon + Nikole Herriott4/7Smoked Salmon Tartines
Sometimes, living in New York is very depressing. But then I think: Where else would I be in this close proximity to such high-quality hot-smoked salmon? (Okay, the entire Pacific Northwest, but just give me this one.) Buying hot-smoked salmon is essentially like picking up an already cooked fillet of fish, except it's somehow been imbued with gentle smokiness and has an incredibly rich texture. On a thick-cut piece of toast with crème fraîche and fried capers, for a dinner that comes together in 10 minutes (assuming you already pickled some onions)? I mean, is this real life?
Photo by Linda Xiao5/7Basic Bulgogi
This is almost a cop-out choice because it is not just one of my favorite recipes but The Internet's favorite recipe. (I think it was our most popular recipe of 2016.) As they say on Passover, why is this dinner different from all other dinners? Because instead of coming home, being really excited to eat, and then realizing you were supposed to have started marinating the chicken or whatnot, like, 24 hours before, you use thinly sliced meat (I typically go for short ribs or hanger steak) that will absorb a flavor-packed marinade in the time it takes to cook a pot of rice.
6/7Pimenton Roast Chicken
Okay, I know what you're thinking. What kind of weirdo roasts two chickens? Don't worry about the picture. Just invest in one of those really pretty jars of hot smoked paprika—which gives this dish its deeply savory, little-bit-spicy taste—and spread it on one chicken. Despite what I said earlier about how annoying/impossible marinating is, you really want to rub the paprika on the chicken the night before to let the full power of the spice manifest itself. Worth it!
Christina Holmes7/7Marinated Tofu with Peanuts and Charred Bean Sprouts
Ever since my neighborhood grocery store started carrying Hodo Soy, a high-quality tofu producer out of the Bay Area, I have really gotten back into fermented soy. This dish, which actually comes from chef Peter Serpico, was, for me, what Oprah might call an "Aha!" moment: You don't actually have to cook tofu to make it taste delicious. All you need to do is soak it in ginger-spiked soy sauce for a few minutes, char some bean sprouts, and you have dinner.
