19 super easy meal ideas from readers’ go-to recipe files
Back in the summer, we featured a call-out to readers for their favorite super-easy lunches and dinners and you delivered. You gave us a ton of awesome lunch and dinner ideas! Let’s face it, we’re also tired after work, amirite? I’ve divided them into categories: grains and stuff, easy pastas, salads and greens, and sandwiches and toasts.
There are a lot of super easy meal ideas to be had here…
Use up all those summer tomatoes with these easy tomato recipes
If you grow your own tomatoes or simply snag them from your local grocer or farmer’s market, you know that our love affair is almost over. Soon it will be fall and we’ll be rolling around like dogs in pumpkin puree instead. So we need to celebrate the summer fruit veggie fruit(?) that is… the luscious tomato. Here are three of my favorite easy tomato recipes to use up your summer supply.
Salad potluck: the easiest, cheapest, healthiest way to avoid packing lunch
It started with a workplace baby shower with a salad potluck directive: everyone bring something you can put on a salad. As we stood around munching, while cards were opened, we thought, “Hey, this was REALLY easy, and it’s healthy, too! We need to do this more often!” It helps us all eat healthier and it makes “packing lunch” as simple as throwing a random fridge vegetable or a bag of dried cranberries or can of black beans in your bag.
3 picnic potluck recipes to win summer
Have you been invited to a bunch of summer picnics and need something really easy and portable to make ahead and take with you to share? These easy summer picnic potluck recipes are just the ticket. Pasta salad, easy refrigerator dough apps, and a summery dessert give you lots of options.
Bricolage salad: Best fucking salad ever, plus some vegetable storage tips
After seeing me take an hour to make a salad for the Offbeat Home Cooking Challenge, my friend Lana sent me this email and recipe for a “bricolage salad.”
Megan-simple kale salad (with bonus scavenger cocktail action)
It seems my friends make EVERYTHING with kale — salads, risottos, pastas, and even drinks. I go to my buddy Jessica’s house once a week so that she can make sure I’m eating at least one meal that’s not microwavable, and this time I stopped drinking wine long enough to document her incredible kale salad recipe. (Not only that, but we got a little creative and made a cocktail out of the leftover kale stocks.)
Fart-free spicy bean salad
I have to have protein or I get cranky and tired. It seems the best non-meat protein option is the musical fruit… beans. After doing some research I heard that a natural cure for gas is cumin seeds. So I got to work on a recipe that incorporated cumin with the beans to come up with a dish that had fewer musical side-effects.
A Megan-simple sesame chicken salad
This is a great salad to pack for lunches. It’ll keep for about a week in the fridge, but I like it so much it’s never lasted that long. It’s also a very forgiving recipe, so add more of the ingredients you like and cut back those you don’t like or don’t have.