Chilaquiles – Easy Weeknight Meal

By Ben Mims
For Cooking Newbie, a blog for beginner cooks

One of my favorite ways to make weeknight meals even easier is to reuse leftovers from the night before in a totally new way. And often, it can be much easier than you think.

Where I live in San Francisco, I’m surrounded by restaurants that serve burritos, so I’m constantly eating them. They often come with a basket of tortilla chips for free, like most other Mexican restaurants across the country.

I’m never able to even touch the chips because I’m too full, once I eat the burrito. My solution is to save the chips and make chilaquiles.

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Quick Homemade Meat Sauce for Pasta

By Joanne Lamb Hayes
The latest from Inside Special Fork

When my family goes out to an Italian restaurant, despite all the enticing choices on the menu, half of the group orders Pasta with meat sauce. So I figured out early on that making this dish at home is a good way to get everyone to eat their dinner.

Rather than using a prepared pasta sauce, with this quick recipe you can create a homemade sauce that is ready to serve in the time it takes to bring the pot of water to a boil and cook the pasta.

A few years ago, I started adding some carrots to the sauce and no one complained. You can skip them if you want, but they provide a little sweetness to balance the acidity of the tomatoes and bring the added nutrition of another vegetable to the meal.

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Pita Pizza – Another Quick, Weekday Meal

By David Hu
A new video for Video Friday

I’ve noticed a pattern with my cooking over the years. I usually start off the week all gung ho about cooking. On Monday I’m experimenting with a new recipe, or making an old favorite with 20 ingredients, multiple steps and four hours of cook time. Yay! So exciting and full of energy!

But after a few days, my enthusiasm wanes and I can’t even remember what possessed me to make those complicated dishes earlier in the week.

Wednesday is hump day and by then, my cooking ambition has evaporated. That’s when I turn to my storehouse of quick and easy weekday meals. My requirements to get into this rotation are simple: tastes good, needs few ingredients and requires short prep and cook times.

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Chicken Chopped Salad

Lori Powell
For One or Two Bites, a blog for singles and couples

For a super quick weeknight meal, I often go to my fridge and see what’s kicking around and make a salad. This version is a chicken chopped salad.

The first one I ever had was in Los Angeles and it was all the rage then many years ago. It was a textural feast as well as a many layered flavored salad…crunchy with fried noodles, sturdy lettuce, toasted nuts, tender chicken and a creamy or Asian salad dressing enrobing it all.

I often cook some version of a chicken on the weekend so that I can transform it into many different main courses or lunches during the week. And when I’ve run out of that I sometimes splurge on a rotisserie chicken from my local market.

I always have some form of cabbage in my fridge which is, to me, an essential ingredient in any salad for a hit of healthy crunch; some lettuce; fresh herbs and I always have a huge assortment of nuts in the freezer. So in minutes, I have a healthy and super-satisfying main course salad on my table.

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Soup, a Simple Weeknight Meal

By Ben Mims
For Cooking Newbie, a blog for beginner cooks

When it comes to simplicity in a weeknight meal, you can’t get make anything much easier than chicken soup. And making it homemade is really – no, really – much easier than you think.

You don’t need chicken stock; you don’t need expensive noodles. All you need are five core ingredients, and then whatever else you like, whether it’s what you already have lying around in the pantry or what you plan to pick up at the grocery over the weekend.

Simply sweating down vegetables (the term refers to cooking vegetables over low heat until they gently “sweat” out the moisture within) and using dark meat chicken are the keys to a flavorful stock and soup that you can then garnish a million ways.

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