5 Little Lessons from 50 Episodes of The Dinner Plan

Plus, my most-repeated recipe of the year.

Some of you have been here from the start last summer, when I psyched myself up to hit ‘record’ on a conversation with one of my favorite cookbook authors. This coming week, the 50th show will go live(!), and I’m so grateful to all of you who’ve made it possible by listening, by calling in with your kitchen voice memos, and especially by becoming paid supporters. If you’re reading this before August 31st, be sure to go enter this big pantry / kitchen gear / cookbook giveaway!

A bonkers giveaway of cookbooks, kitchen gear, and superstar pantry ingredients

There’s no real way to distill 50 conversations into a pithy summary—and if you’re new around here I do hope you’ll dive in and listen to them all—but I wanted to highlight a few tips I’ve learned through these chats in case they’re helpful to any of you.

Down at the bottom of this newsletter, you’ll also find the easy Julia Turshen recipe I can’t stop talking about—the recipe I’ve made more than any other this year so far. I highly recommend adding it to your rotation.

This send is coming your way thanks to support from East Fork Pottery. Use code DINNERPLAN for 15% off regularly priced items—including their brand new hue, Guava, and the last few plates, bowls, and platters in Yuzu and Prune.

1. Don’t start with a blank calendar.

It’s not the act of chopping or stirring that makes being responsible for dinner feel tiring. It’s more often decision fatigue: the fact of needing to think about what to cook over and over, even when everything else in life is overwhelming.

Part of the problem is starting from zero each time, and thinking of each dinner as a completely blank page.

If you’re trying to plan ahead a bit without boxing yourself into eating something you don’t really want, establishing a regular rotation of loose categories of meals can give you a bit of activation energy.

The categories can be anything you love to eat. Hetty Lui McKinnon’s week, for example, tends to kick off with soup or something stewy, alongside a store-bought loaf of bread. Then there’s a vegetable-packed pasta night, a night of hearty salad, and a night that starts with rice: “You can do a curry, you can do some sort of stir-fry, some sort of like quick, you know, oven sheet-pan situation with a vegetable and tofu and a really good punchy sauce,” she says.

Narrowing the choices down to loose categories feels less overwhelming while still giving you some wiggle room to follow your cravings.

Maybe Friday night you know you’re doing sandwiches (or tacos, or picnic night, or breakfast for dinner!) but there are a lot of ways that each of those can go.

You could arrange your nights by ingredient: fish, tofu, whatever sort of meat your household eats.

The theme could be “dishes from childhood I’m nostalgic for.” I’ve been thinking about my mother’s cornflake-crusted chicken, which is also really good cold the next day.

I also need to officially declare one night a week to eat things from the freezer. I’m lucky to have those things tucked away, and they’re not getting any better.

This loose schedule is meant to narrow the options for you in order to welcome in more specific ideas. Don’t feel like you need to tackle a whole week of specifics at once. Think in two-day chunks if that helps.

I learned from my friends

Meghan Splawn

and

Stacie Billis

to keep a list of any hits to repeat later. We quickly forget the meals we loved.

2. You probably don’t need to shop.

Roaming around a grocery store can sometimes be inspiring, but when you actually make a list of everything you have in your freezer, fridge, and pantry, it might turn out that you have a meal or more on hand already. (Some folks find it useful to keep an inventory note right on the fridge or freezer; magnetic white boards are great for this.)

A basic formula that leans on pantry staples can help you cook what you’ve got without spending any more money. Build a plate like Gena Hamshaw does: 1) a grain 2) a green, and 3) a bean—and remember those categories can be pretty loose. The grain element could be quinoa or rice, but also pasta or flatbreads from the freezer. Rebecca Firkser’s framework is similar: Condiment or sauce, can of something, grain or pasta, plus whatever veg you can find.

And speaking of condiments…

3. The sauce makes the dish.

You’ll never get bored of even the simplest proteins and basic vegetables if you always drizzle them with some sort of flavorful sauce.

I’ve quickly reached the bottom of this bottle of char siu sauce and this Thai chili nut crunch. So many of my podcast guests have mentioned leaning on chili crisp and Bachan’s sauces (have you tried the dipping version?), and I keep having to re-order Molly Baz’s Hot Giardinayo.

We are living in a golden era of store-bought sauces—there are more good ones on the market every month. But a really quick homemade sauce can be even more transformative.

Try tons of herbs + lemon + vinegar.

Just stir together yogurt, garlic, and lemon.

Mix cherry preserves into a bit of harissa for a fruitier chile flavor.

Add chopped kimchi to your mayo—or bump up plain mayo with the adobo sauce from a can of chipotles, lime juice, and a pinch of instant bouillon.

Combine gochujang with brown sugar, tahini, soy sauce, and sesame oil.

Make your own custom hot honey by mixing honey and your favorite chili crisp.

Whip up a creamy dressing for vegetables in the blender with silken tofu, rice vinegar, tahini, and store-bought crispy garlic.

Don’t forget about peanut sauce.

You can use many sauces as a marinade—and get extra tenderizing power if you stir in a little yogurt.

You can turn any salsa into a compound butter.

If it needs it, you can thin out any sauce with a bit more oil (or sometimes water) and something tart to make it into a salad dressing.

These days, if I do one bit of weekend meal prep, it’s sauce prep. And I’m always happy to have that sauce on hand.

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4. When in doubt, grab a rotisserie chicken.

If you eat chicken, nothing saves time like a store-bought rotisserie bird. The Dinner Plan’s guests have shared more than a few ideas for dressing up this shortcut.

Rick Martinez tosses the chicken with salsa and piles it onto tostadas with creamy refried beans. Rebecca Firkser pairs the shredded meat with mustard and potatoes in this picnic-ready galette.

Want Alyse Whitney’s Buffalo chicken dip for dinner? Start with a rotisserie chicken.

Susie Theodorou sometimes tosses the meat with an herby green goddess, then piles it all onto an iceberg wedge with store-bought crispy onions and slices of pickle. Other days, she layers shredded chicken on focaccia with tomatoes, red onions, and arugula to build a big sandwich. She also turns a rotisserie chicken into chicken salad with a bit of kimchi and its juice, plus toasted sesame oil and Kewpie mayo. And when she’s craving greens, she dresses plain cooked chicken with salsa verde to pile on top of a simple kale salad.

Marisel Salazar uses rotisserie chicken as a filling for this sandwich made with fried plantains instead of bread. Carla Lalli Music subs cooked chicken for the turkey in this glass noodle dish. And Calvin Eng simmers the carcass to make deeply soothing congee. I highly recommend it.

5. Build in a break, but don’t wait for inspiration.

I tend to think of cooking as a creative practice that needs nurturing. We get inspired when we fill the well with delicious food that other people have cooked, with flavor combinations we haven’t tried before. When we stroll through the market admiring the eggplants and plums. To me, cooking feels best when I begin from a place of inspiration like that.

Sometimes getting there requires a break: Batch-cooking for a hands-off meal and easy repurposing. Committing with a friend to host a weeknight dinner on alternate weeks. Outsourcing the planning to someone like Zoe Barrie Soderstrom of

Restaurant Dropout

. Picking up prepped food or takeout, eating what you’ve stashed away in your freezer.

If cooking (and planning to cook) are some of the few things in your life that you can make easier, make them easier.

I think I started the show, though, in part to chase that spark of inspiration, whether in cookbook recommendations, or other people’s beloved recipes, or the way my guests think about what to do with whatever’s in someone’s fridge.

But conversations on the podcast have reminded me of another side of the coin—sometimes cooking itself can be a practice that gets us through challenging times. The rhythm of it can hold us steady.

Even if you can’t imagine making something complex, the physical sensations of cutting onions or grating ginger can help quiet the mind. As Meera Sodha mentioned, tuning in to what you’re craving can bring you back to yourself.

Sometimes we need to cobble together something truly simple. Sometimes we can manage to repeat a favorite. Consider this permission not to feel inspired when you enter the kitchen. You may feel better by the time you leave.

Photo: Julia Turshen

Turkey Meatballs With Gochujang Glaze

Reprinted from What Goes With What: 100 Recipes, 20 Charts, Endless Possibilities. Copyright © 2024 by Julia Turshen. Reprinted with permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.

These Korean-inspired meatballs are great served with rice, a vegetable or two, and some kimchi. I especially like them with gingery baby bok choy and a pile of sliced cucumbers. You can add some thinly sliced scallions to the meat mix if you’d like a bit more texture and color. You can also substitute any type of ground meat (pork would be especially juicy). Like all meatballs, these are a perfect cocktail snack when made bite-sized. Whether you’re enjoying them for your main meal or as an appetizer, you can double the glaze so you will have extra sauce, if you’d like.

Makes 16 small meatballs (about 2 to 4 servings, depending on side dishes)

For the meatballs:
1 large egg
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon fish sauce
¾ cup panko breadcrumbs
1 pound ground turkey (preferably dark meat)
Cooking spray

For the glaze:
3 tablespoons gochujang
3 tablespoons honey (or maple syrup)
2 tablespoons water

1. Make the meatballs: Preheat your oven to 400°F. Line a sheet pan with parchment paper.

2. Place the egg, sesame oil, soy sauce, and fish sauce in a medium bowl and whisk well to combine. Stir in the panko and then mix in the turkey (your hands are the best tool at this point). Divide the mixture into 16 portions, shaping them into balls (it’s easiest to divide the meat mixture in half, then in half again and so on), and space them evenly on the sheet pan.

3. Spray the meatballs with cooking spray and roast until just about firm to the touch, about 15 minutes.

4. Meanwhile, make the glaze: Place the gochujang, honey, and water in a small bowl and whisk well to combine.

5. When the meatballs are just firm to the touch, pour the glaze evenly over them and return them to the oven (the glaze will seem liquidy at this point and that’s okay; it will thicken in the oven). Continue to roast until the meatballs are totally firm to the touch and the glaze is nice and glossy, about 5 minutes. You can always crack one of the meatballs open to make sure it’s cooked through, if you need some reassurance!

6. Roll the meatballs in the thickened glaze on the sheet pan to coat them and serve hot.

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