My summer greatest hits

Every dinner you need to make before the weather cools

Last summer was a bit of a blur, but maybe summers always are.

We prepped my parents to move across the country, then reversed all the details when a medical crisis delayed the move. My kid got COVID, missing camp, and I finished each day of work with a headache and often tears.

I juggled until I could not juggle; by fall I couldn’t keep all the balls in the air.

But we still ate.

I made pan con tomate. There was an absurdly good, crisp wedge salad served on plates we chilled in the fridge as a joke. I turned boxed pasta into spaghetti bottarga, a dish I fell in love with at La Ciccia, a Sardinian restaurant in San Francisco. If you’ve become, over the past few years, more enthusiastic about anchovies, then bottarga—cured mullet roe—is an excellent next step. The pasta is garlicky and spicy and just perfectly fishy and funky, and because the bottarga is cured, it’s a great last-night-of-vacation dish.

This summer has been different. Quieter. Slower. The freelance editing work I’d counted on suddenly evaporated; a big project went sour. Just going to the kitchen and cooking dinner sometimes helped to find some calm.

Inspired by an episode of Didn’t I Just Feed You from

Meghan Splawn

and Stacie Billis, I started keeping a list of greatest hits, the dinners so good that they earned repeat status. But why keep the list to myself?

You still have a few weeks of warm weather to fit these into your dinner plan—and most of these will make really good fall meals, too.

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1. Like everyone else on the planet, I’m always looking to convert a rotisserie chicken into a more interesting dinner. This is usually an improvisational affair. But this New York Times recipe for Chickpea-Chicken Salad With Green Harissa Dressing became an instant repeat in my house. The sauce is flavored with chiles, cumin, and yogurt—sometimes I whir in some extra cilantro to boost that sense of green.

2. I made a few versions of this cooling cucumber, avocado, and pea gazpacho after seeing Emily Eggers make it on TikTok, using some garlic scapes instead of the chives and garlic. I added a bit of Greek yogurt and the final result was so refreshing.

3. These al pastor skewers are obviously delicious with pork, but sometimes I just make the marinade—whirring in a bit of the pineapple for sweetness—and use it as a sauce to dress up crispy roasted tofu and/or mushrooms for vegetarian tacos. (You can roast some pineapple on a separate tray to add at the end.) Give each taco some cilantro and chopped onion and squeeze of lime.

4. I cross-tested Kendra Vaculin’s quick pork meatballs with cucumber salad for Epicurious awhile back, and loved it so much that I make it all the time. We are in a moment where the cucumbers actually taste like something—especially if you can get little knobby interesting ones.

5. The idea of putting panko in turkey burgers did not at all appeal to me, but the Crispy California Turkey Burgers in this America’s Test Kitchen Ultimate Burger book somehow work. (I think it’s the addition of Monterey Jack and mayo in the patty.) There’s a preview of the book available on both Google Books and Amazon, and I’m currently able to see the recipe. If you don’t have a weird nostalgia for sprouts like I do, you can skip them, but some kind of ketchup-and-mayo sauce, maybe dressed up with something spicy, is a good idea.

6. Our local Japanese market sells frozen barbecue eel that just needs to be warmed up under a broiler. It’s so good in a bowl with rice (or a mix of grains), edamame, cucumber, avocado, and crunchy cabbage tossed in this sesame dressing. For ease, I tend to use store-bought sesame paste rather than starting with the seeds.

7. Make It Fancy might seem, well, too fancy for anyone who feels pressure on weeknights, but the pistachio dukkah alone—a simple chopped-up combination of ctoasted pistachios, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, coriander, cumin, chile, and salt—is worth the price of admission. I made a big jar full using this little gadget, and put it on everything all week long: wedges of tomatoes, other salads, roasted vegetables, simple cooked proteins, avocado toast…

8. Skewers of leg of lamb cubes rubbed with New York Shuk harissa and cooked on the grill. That’s the whole recipe. Add a quick salad of chunky veg like cucumbers and tomatoes and mint.