It’s always good to have low-work, high-payoff recipes up your sleeve for dinners that feel like little luxuries (which is more or less the ethos of our Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter). But they’re especially handy this time of year, when the snow is falling and friends are calling, yoo-hoo. Go ahead, invite them over for an impromptu Thursday get-together, and make Ali Slagle’s ginger-dill salmon (above). It’s fast (roughly half an hour from prep to table), easy (the salmon bakes at a low temp after you slather it with the aforementioned ginger and dill), and bright and flexible (readers note playing around with the citrus to suit their tastes). “So elegant! So delicious! OMG So easy!” raves Charlotte Thacker, a reader — exactly what we want for a casual dinner thing.
Featured Recipe
Ginger-Dill Salmon
Colu Henry’s pasta alla norma sorta also fits our “fuss-free but fancy-feeling” theme (and it’s a lot of fun to say). The “sorta” part is the addition of prosciutto to the Sicilian classic — the rendered fat is used to cook the garlic, shallot and chile, and the cooked pieces are crumbled over the finished pasta for crispy hits of salt. Colu also swaps the ricotta salata for mozzarella in her version, which makes for a milky, creamy contrast to the prosciutto and chile.
For even more crispy, try this five-star pork schnitzel with quick pickles from Melissa Clark. Von Diaz’s sazón chicken breasts are not crispy — though they have plenty of kick from a sazón-heavy marinade — but they would be fantastic cut up and piled onto a crisp bed of shredded cabbage.
Hetty Lui McKinnon’s vegetarian gado-gado is the perfect sort of help-yourself meal: Place her subtly spicy satay sauce in the center of your table and surround it with plates of just-blanched green beans and cabbage, sliced firm tofu, boiled potatoes, cold wedges of tomato and bias-cut cucumber coins. For extra points, grab a bag of light-as-air shrimp chips for extra crunch and fun (they stick to your tongue in a pretty pleasing way).
And for the sort of friendly dinner best eaten cross-legged on the couch, there’s Hetty’s butternut squash congee with chile oil. Ladle the soothing, savory rice porridge into heavy ceramic bowls, pass around extra chile oil or chile crisp, and share the blankets.
