Dinner

Lickety-split pizza, thanks to a tortilla.

Pull out your trusty sheet pan.

Yeah, they're as good as they sound.

This food icon's first cookbook recipe did *not* disappoint.

This piece was created for Cubby, our weekly newsletter for families at home. Want more? Sign up here for a weekly splash of fun and good ideas for families with kids. Join us over on Instagram for more! When it comes to mealtimes, everyone in my family has a different idea of success. For my 3-year-old, Hazel, it’s whatever is the fastest route to dessert. For my 9-year-old, Lily, it’s carbs on carbs and plenty of ketchup.

This piece was created for Cubby, our weekly newsletter for families at home. Want more? Sign up here for a weekly splash of fun and good ideas for families with kids. When I was growing up, every week started out with Monday Leftover Night. My parents called it “King’s Table Night,” named after a long-defunct buffet in their native Seattle.

When I was growing up, eating out usually meant going to an Asian restaurant or an American fast food joint. Our very rare visits to sit-down, non-Asian restaurant were big deals, and we mostly went to chain restaurants. One favorite was the Macaroni Grill, and I always ordered the exact same dish: salmon with a side of sun-dried tomato orzo pasta. I ordered it not because I loved the salmon, but because that orzo was just so delicious.

This piece was created for Cubby, our weekly newsletter for families at home. Want more? Sign up here for a weekly splash of fun and good ideas for families with kids. Whenever I ask my kids if they have any dinner requests before I make our weekly menu, at least one of them will shout for “pesto pasta!” It’s one of those family recipes that has become a household staple, the kind of dish that I imagine they’ll always remember from their childhood.

There have been many points when I felt totally tired of cooking this year. But now, with the weather warming up and plenty of outdoor memories to make, I’m feeling the cooking fatigue more than ever. And since I can’t totally quit cooking for the week, I’m opting for the next best thing: stacking my meal plan with the easiest and most comforting recipes I know.This week’s dinners require minimal effort (and minimal cleanup!

Feeding kids can be tricky. It’s tough to find the time, and can be even tougher to figure out what your kids will actually eat. Not to mention, every kid is different — some will happily eat bowls of broccoli, while others won’t go near a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs if there’s a single “chunk” in the sauce. We asked readers on Facebook to share their favorite kid-friendly Instant Pot meals with us.

I used to think Valentine’s was a cheesy Hallmark holiday for saps. And then I had kids. Falling in love with my family gave me so much excitement to celebrate love in its many, nuanced, and complex forms. Where I once scoffed at Valentine’s Days cards, I’m now buying one for my husband from our new dog (truly) and planning out family Valentine’s Day activities.

A few years ago I ordered a heart-shaped pizza from a big pizza chain, and boy was I disappointed; I paid something like $14 for a pizza that was barely big enough to feed me and my two preschoolers at the time and was more oblong than heart-shaped. I vowed to never order a holiday pizza again and set out to find the best method for making heart-shaped pizza at home.

Feeding a preschooler can be a wild ride. Starting at around age two, lots of kids start to get a bit um… discerning, about what they will and won’t put into their mouths. Testing boundaries and reticence to trying new things is “normal” at this age and can continue for a few years, but it’s hard to feel reassured when one day your your little one wants to eat grilled cheese at every single meal forever and ever and the next day they won’t touch the stuff.

In some ways, my 3-year-old is actually a pretty open-minded eater. To my surprise, she’s always loved vegetables. She’ll chow down on roasted broccoli or squash, and will pop cherry tomatoes and peas like they’re candy.One thing she doesn’t always love, though? Meat. We have a few reliable options (chicken is always the common denominator), but with almost anything else — like beef, pulled pork, or any sort of fish — she’s not interested.

If there’s one thing harder than deciding what to make yourself for dinner, it’s coming up with easy dinner ideas for your kids. You want to get something on the table that’s fairly quick to make and doesn’t require a lot of effort. And you also want a meal that the kids (and ideally the whole table!) will devour, while contending with food preferences that can ping-pong from week to week. And it can feel even trickier when you have a picky eater on your hands.

When there’s a toddler in the house, it makes all the difference to have a handful of dinner recipes that don’t take long to pull off. Now that your kiddo is running around, you can’t turn your back for a second! And even more importantly, you need meals that will please the newly choosy palates of little eaters without boring bigger eaters to tears.

When I was growing up, we didn’t eat meat on Fridays. Instead, in our household, the sad alternative was usually fish sticks. I don’t have particularly fond memories of them from back then — the standard ones we often bought were usually pretty bland and soggy — but nevertheless, we ate them for dinner and got on with it. I now can honestly say that frozen fish sticks don’t have to be sad. In fact, they have come a long way since the days of my youth.

I spent the spring eyeing Chrissy Teigen’s spicy miso pasta, a combination of one of my favorite dishes (carbonara) with extra umami from miso and a hit of spice. Photo after photo popped up on Instagram, my Twitter feed seemed to taunt me with its popularity and its savory, carb-y heat. The internet seemed to be obsessed in general, but also a lab designing my favorite food could only have come closer by somehow working in a little ice cream at the end.

Salads are a staple of healthy eating. Add in the fact that a good salad requires zero cooking, and I’m won over. But I am a salad-lover who is also a mom of two. And when guests come over, they are often surprised to see me making salad for my kids—and more surprised to see the kids eating it. How do I do it? The answer is actually simple: I make finger salads.

At 5, my youngest has officially left the toddler years, but the struggles of feeding a toddler are not too far away from my memory. Toddlers bounce from happy and inquisitive to tired and cranky easily without the capacity to tell us that they are hungry and headed for a meltdown. All of this is to say that after a day, or a week, or even hours of extraordinary emotional highs and lows and generally wrestling a wild, stubborn 2-year-old, you are tired. And you all still need to eat.

Do you remember the absolute joy you’d feel when your mom would pop open a can of biscuit dough and a package of bite-sized sausages — meaning pigs and a blanket were on the horizon? Our version embraces that exuberance, but we’re upgrading the whole thing. Thanks to our smart technique, you don’t have to individually wrap 50 tiny sausages to create the perfect bite of flaky, buttery pastry and smoky sausage (but more on that later).

For all the times I have ordered chicken lettuce wraps at Chinese restaurants like P.F. Chang’s, inhaled entire “appetizers” by myself, and sighed with happiness while licking sticky sauce from my fingers, it never once occurred to me to try making this dish at home. Partly, lettuce wraps have always felt like an indulgence that needed restriction to restaurant visits only.

Getting kids to try new foods is simply an exercise in marketing. Case in point: When I made falafel for dinner one night, I called them chickpea nuggets instead of falafel and my children gobbled them right up. They asked for chickpea nuggets again and it got my mind churning with an idea for an actual chickpea nugget recipe — one with all the flavors and textures of chicken nuggets, but baked and egg-free.

Packed with vitamin-rich sweet potatoes, this simple soup is a quick family meal that ensures a dose of veggies even in a relatively small portion. The natural creaminess from the potatoes provides a pleasing texture for kids and is delicious topped with everything from crumbled bacon to a dash of hot sauce for parents. The red lentils are more subtle in flavor than their brown and green counterparts, and they cook about three times as fast, so they’re ideal for weeknights.