Easy Weeknight Dinner Ideas

A weeknight dinner has one job: get everyone fed without wrecking the evening. These recipes keep the ingredient list short and the steps simple.

None of them need a special trip to the store or a stack of dirty pans, so they're easy to keep in the rotation.

Crispy parmesan-crusted chicken baked on one pan with red potatoes and asparagus, so dinner and cleanup are both easy.

Chicken breasts coated in buttery crushed Ritz crackers and baked until golden, with only a handful of ingredients.

One pot, pantry staples, and a bag of cheese tortellini — this is the recipe to reach for when nobody has the energy to decide on dinner.

Sheet-pan fajitas with almost no cleanup — the kind of dinner that keeps a meal plan from falling apart on a Tuesday.

A sticky, five-ingredient glaze turns weeknight salmon into something worth planning around. On the table in 20 minutes.

Tips

Pick three or four weeknight dinners on the weekend and shop once. Deciding is the hard part, not cooking.
Prep tomorrow's vegetables while tonight's dinner is in the oven.
Keep one emergency dinner in the pantry for the nights nothing goes to plan.

Let the dinner picker choose, or get the What's For Dinner app to roll from your own list and let the whole household vote.