Recipe planner: 5 fast weeknight meals

Serve these meatballs alone, with your favorite pasta or on a baguette with the tomato sauce spooned over them. This recipe can also be adapted to make a meatloaf.

Here, mild-mannered Savoy cabbage leaves are sauteed in butter for an easy side dish that goes well with just about anything you’re cooking, from roasted sausage to pork chops to salmon. It’s low-effort, totally satisfying, and hits the table in under 20 minutes from start to finish.

This much-loved Greek dish is essentially a slightly more elaborate version of baked beans. In this version from our book “Tuesday Nights Mediterranean,” which features weeknight-friendly meals from the region, we use canned butter beans for ease and speed. And since we’re using canned beans, we can keep all the cooking on the stovetop using just one pan.

Sauteing chicken in a little oil first (rather than poaching in the broth) creates some browned bits in the pan (aka fond) that give this green soup a richer flavor.

The Syrian soup shurba w'kibbeh is pure comfort food, a rustic mixture of meatballs and rice in a simple tomatoey broth that's redolent with warm spices. It's also a prime example of the complex flavor you can build by drawing on ingredients already in your pantry.

Brownie batter that’s baked in a skillet produces a slightly different product than brownie batter baked in a traditional baking pan. Skillet brownies are gooey in the center and crisp around the edges and meant to be eaten with a spoon.