Easy Weeknight Dinners: 8 Recipes and a Simple Plan

The hardest part of easy weeknight dinners usually isn't the cooking; it's deciding what to make at 6 p.m. when everyone is hungry. A short list of reliable recipes and a little planning solves most of that. Here are eight of our quickest dinners, a sample plan for the week, and the habits that keep weeknight cooking simple.

8 easy weeknight dinners, from fastest to slowest

Total times include prep. Each recipe has a servings control and a one-tap metric switch.

You can see all of them, kept up to date, in our dinner in 45 minutes or less collection.

A simple five-night plan

This plan balances fish, chicken and meat-free nights, and reuses ingredients to keep the shopping list short.

1. Monday: sheet-pan lemon garlic chicken thighs. Cook a few extra thighs for later in the week.
2. Tuesday: chickpea and spinach curry with rice. Make a double batch and freeze half.
3. Wednesday: Greek salad with Monday's leftover chicken and warm pita.
4. Thursday: crispy black bean tacos, using the cilantro and lime from the curry.
5. Friday: sheet-pan Dijon salmon with green beans.

Add each recipe to the shopping list builder and it combines the ingredients into one list, scaled to your servings, so you shop once.

Habits that make weeknight cooking easier

Keep a stocked pantry

Canned tomatoes, beans, coconut milk, rice, pasta and a few spices cover half the recipes above. See how to stock a weeknight pantry for a full list, or download the printable checklist from our free downloads.

Prep components, not whole meals

Spend 30 to 60 minutes at the weekend on things that speed up several dinners: cook a pot of rice (see how to cook rice on the stove), make a jar of vinaigrette, wash salad greens, and chop onions. Prepared components stay flexible, so you're not eating the same dish five days running.

Cook once, eat twice

Soups, curries and roasted chicken all make good leftovers for lunch or a second dinner. Know how long leftovers last so nothing goes to waste.

Use the oven

Sheet-pan dinners free you from standing at the stove. Our guide to sheet-pan dinners explains how to get crisp, browned results every time.

Run timers, not guesses

When rice, vegetables and a main all finish at different times, the kitchen timers let you run several labelled timers at once.

Cooking for fewer or more people

Every recipe on the site has a servings control that scales each ingredient precisely. To halve a recipe for two, or double it for a crowd, adjust the servings before you shop. To scale a recipe from somewhere else, paste it into the recipe scaler.