Dinner this week: summer edition

The summer produce is incredible right now so we couldn’t sleep on sharing our favorite meals and recipes to help you make the most of the season. We love cooking in the summer - we find ourselves relying less on recipes, keeping it simple, and letting the ingredients do their thing. Summer meals should be easy - we’re all a bit busier, socializing and traveling more than usual, and we want to get dinner on the table fast, with as little fuss and clean up as possible.

Usually this looks like choosing a protein and 1-2 veggies (typically one starch and one non-starch) that we throw on the grill, sometimes adding a sauce to pull it all together. If we have time/energy, we’ll add this simple, seasonal side salad on repeat. It really doesn’t get any better!

Our summer edition of dinner this week is a round up of some of our go-to summer meals that check all the boxes - low effort, high flavor, and on the lighter side for those craving a reset in between travel and parties. Enjoy!

*note: the recipes from the New York Times require a NYT cooking subscription - we find the best recipes from the app all the time, we promise it’s worth it! Email us if you don’t have access. 

Sunday

Salmon and veggies to kick off the week! 

Year round, this is how we make our salmon 9x out of 10 - drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with our favorite sizzle seasoning (a true kitchen workhorse and worthwhile purchase, but a combo of garlic powder, salt, pepper and dried herbs would work if you don’t have this!), and throw on the grill or roast in the oven until cooked to desired doneness. When it’s done, squeeze with ½ to 1 whole lemon, and serve with dill-yogurt sauce. It’s perfect. Full recipe here.

We love serving this with grilled or roasted asparagus finished with lemon. Other sides we like to add to the mix: our favorite summer salad or our go-to arugula salad (arugula, tomatoes, pine nuts or shaved parmesan, balsamic) and/or one of the following starches: grilled or steamed corn, brown rice, or the sweet potato fries featured in the recipe.

Monday

Monday calls for a quick and easy plant-based favorite, our Buffalo Chickpea Chopped Salad. We make this one year-round, but it’s especially good with summer corn and tomatoes. Highly recommend serving with the optional side of chips and guac!

Tuesday

Burger night! We’ve been making these lettuce wrapped turkey burger sliders with sweet potato fries for years and they are always a hit. Sometimes we’ll do a simple beef burger instead. You can’t go wrong.

We love to serve with all the fixin’s (special sauce, bread and butter pickles, red onion and tomato), the sweet potato fries in the recipe, and a side salad.

Wednesday

Pasta night! We’ve said this many times before and we’ll say it again - legume-based pastas are the best weeknight hack (we love Tolerant Foods). They’re high in both protein and fiber, making them an excellent source of plant-based protein - just add veggies and sauce of choice and you have a delicious, balanced meal. 

In the summer, we especially love this Eggplant Pasta Salad from NYT Cooking, and our pesto pasta salad never gets old. This simple, slow roasted tomato pasta that we posted a few years ago remains a forever favorite (it requires some time, but is 99% hands off). We’ll pair it with a big side salad (see all inspo from above, usually some version of one of those!)

Or, if we’re in the mood for a one dish meal, we’ll make a big pasta salad with a mix of roasted and raw veggies, herbs, tons of arugula, sun dried tomatoes and balsamic (we have a great recipe for this in our summer reset).

Thursday

Leftover pasta! Or this One pan roasted fish with cherry tomatoes from NYT Cooking is so good, so easy, and so summery. Pairs nicely with steamed or roasted broccoli, grilled or roasted asparagus, or a simple salad. If you want to serve it with a starch, we love this with brown rice! 

Friday

Grilled balsamic steak salad with arugula, parmesan and cherry tomatoes. 

This meal is perfect alone, but when we have time/motivation, we’ll make a side of these grilled potatoes - make as is, or swap in sizzle seasoning for the old bay. Or, we love to pair this with grilled corn or a piece of our favorite bread. Yum.

Saturday

Take the night off - either out to dinner or takeout!

Sunday

Grilled chicken = summer staple. Our go-to marinated grilled chicken is “Indecision Chicken” from Julia Turshen’s Small Victories, an all time favorite cookbook if you’re in the market. We also love this easy lemon marinade, or marinating in Bachan’s Japanese BBQ marinade for a spin on teriyaki chicken. 

Love doing this whole meal on the grill, pairing it with grilled zucchini and corn. If we have time, we’ll add Chimichurri or herbed yogurt sauce to drizzle over everything. If you happen to be serving a crowd (or not), we love adding this perfect potato salad from Alison Roman - a little more involved but so worth it. 

Another way we love to serve this chicken to make our lives easy: over a big salad! 

A few more things

Where we share all the things we’re loving, reading, listening to, cooking, discussing and purchasing as of late.

1. An old post from the archives with our healthy grilling tips! 

2. Love these grill grids for making veggies on the grill. One too many lost asparagus and zucchini later, this has made our grilling experience much more enjoyable (and fruitful).

3. A full body moisturizing routine is sometimes the last thing we want to do in the heat of summer, but we try to be pretty religious about it, especially after beach days. These three are our all time favorites - moisturizing but light/never greasy and feel indulgent and worthy of making a routine out of (Osea Body Oil, Emergin-C Organics body butter, Necessaire the body lotion) 

4. Techno Sapiens is quickly becoming our favorite new newsletter and resource for how to navigate technology and social media as a parent (and as a person who wants to preserve their mental health and wellbeing). Written by Psychologist and Brown professor Jacqueline Nesi, PHD (who is also a mom to a toddler with a baby on the way), it’s both evidence-based and highly relatable (and funny). She answers the questions we’re all asking and provides great tips and tools. Some favorites from the archive: Screen Time for Toddlers, How to use your phone less, Tech Parenting Tips from Toddlers to Teens, New Year, New Sapiens (25 tips for healthier tech habits in 2023), How to Fix Any Parenting Problem…cutting ourselves off because we love them all.     

5. We really loved this interview with Oliver Burkeman on Liz Moody’s Healthier Together Podcast (we love her podcast in general). It completely reframed our relationship with productivity and time management and freed us (to an extent) from our endless pursuit of hacking our productivity to get it all done. His view is that you can’t - and never will be able to - hack/self-help your way to your most productive life, and invites us instead to think about time differently and make the most of how little of it we actually have. We love a good productivity hack, so we were admittedly reluctant at first, but promise this will change the way you think for the better. 

6. Goop hair scrub. This stuff is really good - everyone on the internet is obsessed and it’s worth the hype. It’s the only scalp scrub that actually lathers into a full shampoo (so doubles as a scrub/shampoo), gets rid of buildup and oil and leaves our hair feeling super clean and bouncy! 

7. We’ve slowly transitioned most of our spices over to Burlap and Barrel. They’re the best of the best and have significantly increased the flavor in our cooking. Highly potent, single origins spices from around the world with a commitment to responsible sourcing. We love them all, but if you need a place to start, we recommend their royal cinnamon, smoked paprika and purple stripe garlic powder.  

8. As our boys have grown and become fully mobile, we had to say goodbye to our love affair with Magnetic Me and Kissy Kissy onesies as we made the switch to two-piece PJs. We tested a ton and these are by far our favorites: Little Sleepies, Lovey & Grink, Kyte, these $20 amazon ones (amazing), and Lake. Disclaimer re: Lake - they have the cutest prints, but we don’t love how little they stretch. All of the others are super soft (like butter) and stretchy which makes bedtime somewhat less of a struggle.