The Antipasti Bar Is the Best Spot in the Grocery Store for Dinner Inspiration — Smart Weeknight Strategies

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Whenever I am lost for dinner ideas and wandering aimlessly through the grocery store (this happens more often than you might think), I make my way over to the antipasti bar. You know the one — it’s that little corner of the store, maybe by the fancy cheese or the deli, with a gorgeous display of olives and marinated vegetables.

The antipasti bar isn’t just a good spot for appetizers or snacks — it’s also a source to gather the inspiration needed to get dinner on the table.

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Recipe: Mini Thai Pork Pitas — Recipes from The Kitchn

(Image credit: Christine Han)

A few years ago, a recipe in a food magazine caught my eye. The recipe involved stuffing pita bread with a thin layer of seasoned ground lamb, then grilling the whole thing until the outside was crispy and the inside stayed nice and juicy. It was an outrageously delicious and fun idea, a bit like hamburger meets pizza pocket. I liked this idea so much I wanted to make it again, but this time with Thai flavors on cute little mini pitas!

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Our Favorite Bottled Caesar Salad Dressings — Augustus Caesar

(Image credit: Courtesy of Kraft)

A Caesar salad is only as good as its dressing. And while it’s not hard to make an incredible one from a few pantry staples, sometimes you just don’t have the time. A bottle of the store-bought stuff is a quick, painless way to get salad on the table fast. But with an aisle full of bottles to choose from, just which one exactly is worth buying? We tasted some of the most popular brands in order to find one that’s worthy of its convenience.

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summer squash pizza

summer squash pizza Stop what you’re doing. Dinner tonight is the very best kind there is: it has five ingredients including the ones to make the pizza dough. It’s seasonal, which means you can use it to decimate your CSA pile-up. And it doesn’t care what else you had in mind; recipes like this exist to disrupt the best-laid meal plans and that’s my favorite thing about them. It is, in fact, pretty much the only thing I want out of any dish, for it, at least for a time to be the thing you have to eat next because now nothing else will do. i had some pretty ones I, too, had a plan, something involving these summer squash but with pesto and burrata and maybe some beans or farro? It hadn’t quite come together yet when I death-wished over to Sullivan Street Bakery last week to pick up a sourdough pullman for the blueberry bread and butter pudding and ended up walking out with six things not on my list, as will happen when you go to an amazing bakery: this crazy pastry and five squares of pizza, which made a fantastic and surprisingly light weeknight dinner miles better than anything that delivers (the irony not lost on the person doing the miles and the delivering). The mushroom was funky and delicious; the cauliflower was speckled with heat; the potato pizza was such a perfect match for this one, I was really proud of myself until I remembered that it’s the same recipe (it’s okay, I’m rolling my eyes too); the pomodoro was loved only by me either because I appreciate simple things that need no adornment (my theory) or because I’m a bore (others‘) but the zucchini pizza with heaps and valleys of deer bed-like shreds? Whoa. I had to get to the bottom of it.

Recipe: Almond-Crusted Chicken Tenders with Honey Mustard — Recipes from The Kitchn

(Image credit: Lauren Volo)

This is precisely the kind of chicken recipe you want to keep in your weeknight dinner rotation. It’s quick and simple, has few ingredients, and gets right to the point. It’s what you should expect when you have a crunchy almond coating and a honey-mustard sauce that plays double duty as a coating for the chicken and a sauce for serving.

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5 Ways to Make Dinner with Pizza Dough — Smart Weeknight Strategies

A ball of store-bought pizza dough can help you make dinner. On busy weeknights, its versatility and convenience just can’t be beat. And while you can obviously make great pizza from pizza dough, the truth is that you can make a whole lot of great things beyond pizza from the dough. Here are five ingenious ways to turn a one-pound ball of pizza dough into dinner.

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