There is one Groupon that my husband and I like to have in the hopper at all times: a deal for a nearby taqueria that gets us three tacos for $7 (versus the $13 they’d be ordinarily). When I logged on to restock this morning, I saw another deal that got me super excited.
Summer is prime grilling season. Any main course you make in the presence of a smoky flame immediately takes on the taste of the season, but the real question is, what side dishes will you make to go alongside your burgers, steak, or grilled chicken breast? That’s where the fun really comes in.
Here are 30 of our favorite summer sides — including everything from grilled cabbage to a colorful summer squash gratin — that play well with dinner from the grill.
Eggs are tiny miracle workers in the kitchen. They can be stored in the fridge for a long time and they are cheap, hard to mess up, and one of the most versatile ingredients you can use. Really, what’s not to love?
So let eggs be your go-to breakfast champion. From soft scrambled eggs to make-ahead breakfast sandwiches and egg casseroles, there’s nothing eggs can’t do to help you kickstart your morning routine.
First off, I promise you there are no tricks to this ice cream. This isn’t “ice cream” in quotation marks. You’re not going to get your hopes up only to have them dashed with a bowl of icy, flavorless frozen dairy substitutes. This vegan ice cream is the real deal.
Yes, it’s creamy. Yes, it tastes like a real dessert that you’d drizzle with caramel sauce and sprinkle with nuts. Yes, it’s dairy-free and vegan too (no eggs!). Here’s what you need to know.
Cabbage is one of those unsung heroes in the kitchen. You might not think too much about it, but it can be one of the most versatile veggies in your arsenal. From traditional slaws and salads to Indian-inspired curries and fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi, we predict you’ll be eating a lot of cabbage.
I’ve been sharing my weekly meal plans here on Kitchn for over a year, and between reader comments and our Meal Plan Club Facebook group (have you joined yet? Click here!) I’ve really come to understand that every person who meal plans has ups and downs.
We talk often about what recipes give us our mojo back or the recipes we reach for when we don’t actually want to cook, but this week’s meal plan is for anyone who is new to meal planning and needs a place to start. The dinners are easy, use some similar ingredients (to cut down on prep and shopping), and are so delicious they’ll prove that meal planning truly is the secret to stress-free weeknight dinners.
When I was growing up, my mother kept vases of fresh flowers all over the house. There were flowers on the kitchen and dining room tables, in the entryway, and stationed in all the windows. She even kept some in the bathroom. Unfortunately, her flower skills did not rub off on me. (I’d say it skipped a generation, but my sister’s house has more flowers than a royal wedding, so I think it just skipped me.)
My flower ineptitude is not for lack of trying, either. I’ve read countless articles and Pinterest tutorials about how to make grocery store flowers look like expensive flower shop bouquets, but I’ve never managed to pull it off. I should have known that the secret to keeping flowers in the house wasn’t Pinterest — it was Ina Garten.
Cotton Candy grapes sound like something you’d find on a tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, or in the cereal aisle next to the Frankenberries, but we’re happy to report that they are very real. The grapes were developed by cross-breeding different types of grapes to create a variety of grape that taste extra sweet. They can be difficult to find and they tend to sell out fast, but now Costco has them in stock in several locations, and people are running to get them before they disappear.
If you’re hesitant to look at your bank account because you went a little overboard on spending this month, join the club! Since we are only halfway through June, we’ve compiled a few simple-yet-smart ways to save and make it to next month without going over your food budget.
We’ve decided to spend as much time as humanly possible at the beach this summer, which has led to my other new favorite habit: grabbing a few cookbooks I’ve been meaning to go through and reading them en route. In the fleeting moments when the kids have limited their bickering in the backseat and the traffic isn’t too terrible, when I’ve been away from my laptop and the kitchen for enough hours that I’m ready to absorb new inspiration, I find myself more open-minded and curious to try new recipes than I am, understandably, in the thick of deadlines and or hangry o’clock, approximately 6:15pm when dinner is nowhere near done.
Two weekends ago it was Saladish, a cookbook from Ilene Rosen, who is the chef and co-owner of R&D Foods in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn and previously did a 15-year stint as the savory chef at City Bakery, creating a salad bar with a cult following. This book is a natural progression. “All of the food I really like to eat and make is saladish,” she says in the intro, something I immediately related to. To me, salads are meals and meals can be salads, and only a fraction of them really need leafy greens. Layers of grains or roasted or raw shaved vegetables plus something pickled or punchy and something crunchy and herby and a good vinaigrette; I ate lunch 15 minutes ago and I literally made myself hungry again typing that.
I struggled a little as the book continued because I kept running into ingredients I didn’t keep around, pappadum, green garlic, makrut lime leaves, Chinese preserved cabbage, pea greens, and honestly, this is barely the tip of the iceberg. There wasn’t a recipe that didn’t have something that required an extra grocery run (easy for me to get in NYC, but still, I am lazy, and even when I overcome it, I know you guys would appreciate me finding alternatives) but wait, come back. You see, the sun was shining in the windows, little puffs of popcorn clouds dotted a blazingly blue sky, the shore towns were approaching, and I decided to stop being such a curmudgeon and look beyond these sticking points, which in many places are merely accents or extras. And here, at the base of each recipe, I found a dozen things I couldn’t wait to make.