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Easy Dinner Recipes: Quick Weeknight Dinner Ideas

A weeknight dinner has one job: get something good on the table without wrecking the kitchen or the evening. Every timing here includes the chopping, so the clock on the card is the clock you will see.

Recipes
72
Quickest
20 min
Avg. hands-on
11 min

Every recipe in Dinner

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72 recipes

How we cook dinner on a weeknight

The fastest way to speed up any recipe is to read it once before you start, then set out every ingredient. Professional cooks call it mise en place; at home it simply means you are not hunting for the cumin while the garlic burns.

Lean on a few workhorse tools: a 12-inch skillet that can go in the oven, a large rimmed sheet pan and an instant-read thermometer. Between them they cover almost every recipe on this site, and the thermometer alone ends the guesswork about whether chicken or fish is done.

Look for the time ribbon on each recipe. It splits the total into hands-on and hands-off time, which tells you when you are free to set the table, help with homework or simply sit down.

Short on time? Baked Tilapia with Lemon Garlic Butter is the quickest here at 20 min, with 8 min of hands-on work.

Every recipe here, by total time
Hands-onHands-off