Pictured Recipe: Slow-Cooker Brisket Sandwiches with Quick Pickle
You'll love this week's meal plan, filled with crowd-pleasing recipes to help you win the weeknight dinner race—and score big with family and friends. These insanely good recipes combine fresh ingredients and bold flavors to create game-changing dinners. Get ready to blow this week out of the water.
Pictured Recipe: Slow-Cooker Brisket Sandwiches with Quick Pickles
Make your BBQ or cookout easy with this slow-cooker beef brisket recipe. Rauchbier, a smoky German beer, gives this fork-tender brisket real pit-barbecue flavor, but you can use any beer that suits your taste, or even substitute beef broth, to achieve mouthwatering results. While the brisket is cooking, whip up the quick pickle recipe and stir together a garlic mayo to top off the sandwiches.
• Slow-Cooker Brisket Sandwiches with Quick Pickles
• Buffalo Cauliflower Bites
• Enjoy with your favorite beer
Pictured Recipe: Brothy Chinese Noodles
This dish was inspired by Chinese Dan Dan noodles—ground pork and noodles in a spicy broth. We use ground turkey and omit the traditional Sichuan peppercorns for convenience, but add hot sesame oil. Use toasted sesame oil instead if you want mild noodles.
Pictured Recipe: Seafood Gumbo
Gumbo, a hearty stew made with anything from sausage or duck to rabbit or seafood, starts with a roux, a mix of flour and oil that’s cooked until it turns dark and nutty, giving the stew recipe its signature earthy flavor. This crab and shrimp gumbo recipe comes from Eula Mae Doré, who was the cook at the Commissary on Avery Island, home to the Tabasco company. Just as most cooks of her generation did, she learned Cajun cooking by watching, rather than from cookbooks.
• Seafood Gumbo
• Serve gumbo with brown rice
• Bananas Foster
Pictured Recipe: Veggistrone
This vegetable-packed minestrone soup recipe is inspired by a popular Weight Watchers vegetable soup recipe. It makes a big pot of soup, so keep some in the refrigerator for up to 5 days and freeze the rest of the vegetable minestrone soup in single-serve portions. That way you always have an easy, delicious vegetable soup to start your meal or to eat for lunch. Think of this vegetable minestrone recipe as a starting point for other healthy soup variations, too: toss in leftover chopped cooked chicken or whole-wheat pasta or brown rice to make it more satisfying.
Pictured Recipe: Quick Pasta Bolognese
Who doesn’t love pasta with a quick meat sauce? This crowd-pleasing healthy spaghetti Bolognese recipe is a boon for busy cooks—it’s ready and on the table in just 40 minutes.
• Quick Pasta Bolognese
• Serve with a Caesar side salad
Pictured Recipe: Lemon & Dill Chicken
Fresh lemon and dill create a quick Greek-inspired pan sauce for simple sautéed chicken breasts. Make it a meal: Serve with roasted broccoli and whole-wheat orzo.
• Lemon & Dill Chicken
• Serve with steamed green beans & whole-wheat orzo
Pictured Recipe: Grilled Filet Mignon with Herb Butter & Texas Toasts
This dish is simply luxurious: grilled beef tenderloin smothered in a vibrant herb butter served on top of a garlicky slab of whole-grain toast. And yes, with only about 303 calories and 14 grams of fat total, this steakhouse-worthy entree can be part of a healthy diet. If you like, make extra herb butter to top chicken, fish or even a grilled pork chop.
• Grilled Filet Mignon with Herb Butter & Texas Toasts
• Vanilla Strawberries with Lemon Ricotta