We have officially reached the last week of summer; back to school is just 10 days away for our family. While I’m looking forward to getting back to our school-year routine, these last few days of summer break are still going to be fun and tasty.
This week, I’m checking a few dinners off my summer bucket list (hello, tomato toast), but also trying some new-to-us recipes that I hope to repeat as school starts. Here are the five dinners I’m cooking for the last week of summer.
If you feel like you blinked and summer is basically over, welcome to the club! And nothing will snap you out of that lazy, hazy summer mentality faster than brainstorming packable lunch box snacks. But don’t stress out just yet — we’ve taken some of the guesswork out of back-to-school snacking for you. (You’re welcome!)
Here are Kitchn editors’ 50 favorite snacks to stock up on this year. Our choices are crunchy, crispy, cheesy, salty, and sweet — and everything in between. Plus, they’re adored by kids and adults alike!
It’s interesting to me how financial experts, mothers-in-law, and total strangers on a Facebook page all have distinct opinions on how much you should spend on groceries. The thing is, while food costs certainly shouldn’t be complex, they can vary from person to person and household to household — even region to region.
Like chicken or pasta, fish is really a blank slate when it comes to preparing it for dinner. Yet, unlike chicken or pasta, fish has a reputation of being hard to prepare, which makes it feel a bit daunting. The truth, however, is fish is just as easy to turn into a quick, flavorful dinner as those other guys. The key is to embrace a few simple tricks that will jazz up just about any fillet you bring home.
We should just rename summer “Tomato Season,” the way people jokingly called autumn “Pumpkin Spice Season” so much that it stopped being a joke and is just the way we talk now. If fall starts when the Pumpkin Spice Lattes appear, every year I think of summer as starting when I put my first baby tomato plant in a pot on my deck and swear that this is the year I’ll remember to water it.
I remember a time in raising my children when I was never without one of those zip-top bags of frozen yogurt bites. If they needed something while we waited for dinner to arrive at the table, or a quiet snack at library story time, there they were. And while I loved making baby food for them and freezing yogurt for snacks, there was just no beating the commercial yogurt bites — even I enjoyed my fair share of the sweet, tangy, melt-in-your mouth texture of those bites.
It almost pains me to have discovered a hack for making dried yogurt bites at home after that season of my child-rearing is coming to an end, but when I discovered I could turn a kitchen staple’s leftovers into tender snack bites, I knew I needed to share this splendid secret.
Last year, Alexandra Stafford published a very good book about bread. It sprang from a recipe for the peasant bread her mother made often when she was growing up. When she shared it on her site, it went viral, which is no surprise given that it’s no-knead, comes together in under five minutes, rises in about an hour, and after a brief second rise, you bake it in buttered bowls that form it into a blond, buttery crusted bread that she boasts is “the antithesis of artisan.” Because there are no hidden tricks; no steam ovens, special flours, lames to score the crust, or bannetons to shape the loaves. Her central tenet is that “good bread can be made without a starter, without a slow or cold fermentation, without an understanding of bakers’ percentages, without being fluent in the baking vernacular: hydration, fermentation, biga, poolish, soaker, autolyse, barm.” (None of those words appear in the book.) She knows that there are a lot of no-knead breads out there, but this is the only one that can be started at 4pm and be on the dinner table at 7.
I realize you’re thinking, as I briefly worried before I read it, how does one write an entire cookbook based on one recipe? But Stafford is a gifted recipe developer, and there isn’t a thing in this book — one part breads (with all types of flours, grains, and shapes, including pizzas, flatbreads, rolls and buns), one part toasts (including sandwiches, tartines, stratas, panzanellas, soups, summer puddings and so much more), and one part crumbs (a celebration of crunchy gratin toppings, stuffing, burgers, eggplant parmesan, fish sticks, meatballs, and brown bettys) — that I didn’t want to make. (I suspect that having four kids to feed ensures that these recipes were vetted by the most finicky of reviewer classes.) It’s also a gorgeous book, with a focus and format that my inner, long-surrendered organized person finds deeply pleasing.
If you’ve been reading any of our lunch-packing stories over the years, you’ve probably seen us use these stainless steel LunchBots containers again and again. They start at $20 (for one with no compartments) and go up to $40 (for the one pictured above with five compartments), which I realize is a lot of money to spend on a lunch box that your kid may or may not remember to bring home.
Here’s the thing, though: I’ve learned that it really is money well-spent! And I’m partial to the one that only costs $25.
Garlic bread is one of dinner’s simple pleasures. It comes together quickly and easily, and the results are always super satisfying, yet a huge market still remains for frozen garlic bread from the supermarket. If you’ve never bought a box to stash in the freezer, you may be wondering, why bother?
Here’s the thing about frozen garlic bread — not only is it a comforting little shortcut for your busy life, but good frozen garlic bread is also totally crave-worthy in its own right. Frozen garlic bread takes full advantage of every inch of surface area on a slice of bread by slathering it with rich garlic butter that basically fries the bread in the oven. Plus, with garlic bread in the freezer, you can make a single slice (or two) whenever the craving strikes.
I love going to high-end cooking stores like Sur la Table and Williams Sonoma. Wandering those aisles, thinking about the kind of cook I could be if I just had the right equipment, is enchanting. And sometimes I actually do need to buy something. My only problem there is that, while they carry the best of the best, the prices tend to match. But recently I’ve been taking a new approach in order to save money on those high-end cookware and appliance brands that I’d normally buy at Sur la Table or Williams Sonoma.