Quick and Easy Dinners

My best quick and easy recipes when you need to get dinner on the table fast. Most are healthy, too!

Essential Pickled Red Onions

January 30, 2021

Essential is the only way to describe them, and I’m tired of going to my own Instagram or the recipe on this blog that originally featured the only pickled red onions I’ve ever loved. The key points: they’re NOT loaded with sugar and the only cooking involves hot tap water. You’re going to want to keep them on hand at pretty much all times, which won’t be a problem, considering how easy and quick the recipe is.

What makes this condiment SO great? It really comes down to this: they’re a weeknight cooking all star. You know that I’ve shifted my focus on this site to plant-based batch cooking, which is all about making weeknight dinners easy without sacrificing taste or variety. Dinners could be anything from a freezer-friendly vegan mac and cheese, to a highly flexible plant-powered bowl, to a simple soup, to–my personal favorite–build-your-own burritos.

But when you’re pulling something out of the freezer, you might be missing that FRESH element. The crunch. The acid. And THAT is where pickled red onions come in. So grab a jar and an onion and let’s get to it!

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Vegan Slow Cooker White Bean Chili

January 11, 2021

When we started eating plant based last fall, my cravings for crock pot white chicken chili all but vanished. Luckily my pantry is brimming with dried beans, so I popped onto Google to quickly grab a recipe for a vegan white chili. The meaty, dairy-laden version I previously enjoyed was easy to throw together in the slow cooker, and that was a big criteria for my recipe search.

But Google came up short (just like I did when photographing this chili in the pot used to reheat it and NOT in the crockpot). Apparently it is REALLY hard to come by a white chili recipe that has ALL of the following characteristics:

Vegan/plant-based
Uses dried beans (not canned)
Made in the slow cooker

In our food blog world, it’s rare that a recipe search basically fails, and I was really bummed. White chicken chili is a great family staple, typically milder than a red chili, so was it really that hard to veganize it? In a crock pot? With dried beans? Doesn’t everyone have dried beans in the pantry during a pandemic??? I was undeterred, but what I thought would be a quick search, grocery order, and assembly had expanded into a recipe development project.

I already knew how to cook dried beans in the crock pot, a skill, in my opinion, that you MUST acquire if you’re to survive long as a plant-based eater (it’s easy: I learned from my favorite cookbook). So I worked in the flavors I love in a white chili and some quick tricks I’ve picked up along the way to really make this a thick CHILI, not just a misleadingly named white bean SOUP.

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5 Ingredient Veggie Tofu Scramble

January 9, 2017

It’s Sunday night, and I should be shooting a few pictures of my Fresh Direct order right now, but, thanks to some mildly serious snow and/or a confused driver, the delivery is running an hour late. Grocery delivery pointers: don’t schedule deliveries after dark if your house is hard to find. Last I checked, the driver is backtracking to find out just where he dropped off the order, since it wasn’t here or at any or our immediate neighbors’ houses.

Meanwhile, I wanted to start giving the recipes from last week’s grocery list their own blog posts, since the ones in the Google Sheet are “rough” outlines, and might not serve beginning cooks well. So we’ll start with breakfast!

If you honestly have tried and hate tofu, there’s probably not much I can do to convince you of the merits of a tofu scramble. But, if you have even the slightest taste for it, there are so many reasons to try this breakfast.
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Dinners for the Week before Vacation

November 3, 2016

There are so many good things going on just in the title of this post. One, I’ve bounced back from a really nasty cold/maybe the flu and am nearly cooking at full force again. It’s a marked improvement from last week’s diet of Boston Market mashed potatoes and Ritz crackers. Two, it’s vacation time! Steve and I are taking a little combo babymoon/first anniversary long weekend trip to Vermont, to a gorgeous, pet-friendly resort. Yep, that’s right, we’re allowing the pugs to infiltrate our romantic getaway. And in case you don’t follow my personal Instagram account, you also may be surprised to find out that, after a rough first dog experience and before adding a baby to the house, we acted like crazy people and adopted another pug. Blog world, meet Nugget (whose name may not be permanent):

He and Clarence are getting along pretty well:

Although, Nugget’s an estimated six years old (he was found as a stray, so we can’t say for sure) and definitely has the old man attitude going on sometimes, like when Clarence wants to play, which is…always. My life is now listening to Clarence bark his head off at poor Nugget to get a little chase going.

BUT, this was not meant to be a pug post. It’s meant to explain how, during a pretty busy week of pug care, getting ready for vacation (i.e., doing 17 loads of laundry…per day), pregnancy, and house upkeep and decorating, I managed to make us (and a client-friend) good, comfort food, warm dinners every night. Except the night I must order pizza.
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Herbal Cherry Frozen Pops

August 27, 2016

On a whim, I grabbed a sucker from the little bin at the Trader Joe’s checkout line last week. Maybe the cashier thought I had a little one waiting at home (or it’s for the pug??), but really I had no shame as I politely asked permission, as a childless grownup, to take one.

That cherry sucker, or lollipop, for those of you confused by my vocabulary, was the best thing I’d tasted all week. I’m not sure HOW, save for artificial flavoring, they pack so much cherry flavor into a tiny piece of candy, but it left me with a craving for more, sans high fructose corn syrup.

Coincidentally, that day happened to be one of many in a stretch of 90-something and humid ones, so, at the next grocery store, I planned to snag a box of whole fruit cherry popsicles. Except there weren’t any. Just weird, unappealing flavors like lime and mango. I was disappointed, but not deterred. It took no time at all for me to get home and unpack the groceries, hop on my laptop, and start searching for cherry popsicle recipes. As a bonus, I’d get to use my newly acquired popsicle mold! A few pages down the Google results, something interesting caught my eye: the reputable Carla Hall’s recipe for frozen cherry pops, with a sugar syrup base infused with all kinds of stomach soothing ingredients. Kind of like an herbal tea blasted, yes, blasted, full of cherry flavor.
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One-Bowl Macadamia Butterscotch Cookies (Gluten Free)

June 18, 2016

Slowly but surely, or rather, cyclically, my breakfast planning is improving. Despite my love of breakfast foods, working from home, without any mandate to arrive for work at a specific time looking a specific way, leads to breakfast decision fatigue, complicating what could be a simple and healthy start to the day. Kind of like that sentence could be one of the longest and most confusing, but I think still grammatically correct, I’ve ever written. Lately, though, in spurts, I manage to portion out a few days of overnight oats, so that I just have to add almond milk for a super productive next morning.

It was on one of these prep nights that my eyes wandered to the back of a fresh bag of Trader Joe’s gluten free oats, to a recipe for–could it be?–an actually cohesive, chewy, and gluten free chocolate chip cookie. [Read more…]

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