This easy lemon vinaigrette recipe has just 5 ingredients and is done in under 10 minutes. I love to make a batch of this each week to have for easy salads. Bonus: use any kind of sweetener (honey, agave) or mustard you like to switch this dressing up each time!
Hey hey hey, lemon dressing!
...Yummy walnut kale pesto made in my favorite food processor (the parts go in the dishwasher!) is the best meal prep ingredient ever! It doesn't require fresh herbs so can be made year-round and keep beautifully in the freezer.
Here's the thing:
I don't actually hate cooking entire meals on the weeknights. I find it relaxing to put our kids to bed, chat with Jay, and make an entire meal start to finish.
Buthoweveralso, when I do that it means that we eat dinner at 9pm and then don't go to bed until 11, and that's not OK. SO, I mostly prep some things and then cook one or two items when we're ready to eat.
...Just in time for summer! Which starts in June I know but the pools open this weekend and I'm a pool rat and pools mean summer and the pools open this weekend so this weekend is summer.
You get it.
This summer! We are going to keep cooking, but we are cooking light in two senses of the word: lighter food calorically, sure. It doesn't feel as great to inhale three plates of pasta when it's 95 degrees outside. But also, light on the actual cooking.
...Ok so here is a five minute doohickey that you can make today and eat all week. PROMISE.
We're starting our week with a sauce! An epic sauce. A wonderful sauce. A spicy peanut sauce that we make in the blender in five minutes and slather all over our lives, not sorry at all about that.
I think most people have categories of food that they eat almost weekly, and sometimes find it a struggle to eat foods that they know/like/can cook but with different flavors. We might always do a veg/chicken/rice meal, a pasta meal, a main dish salad, etc. But those meals can be totally different each week, which I like because I have a list of about ten thousand favorite foods, and I want to eat them all all the time.
...Continuing our leftover plan for the week! I feel like sometimes there are LOTS of leftovers of certain casseroles, especially heavier things. Maybe it's just our family, but if you make an 8-person casserole or side dish BUT there are 97 side dishes and people only eat a few spoonfuls of each thing....leftovers. 
Like mashed potatoes! That we are going to fry into patties and top with stewed apples, latke-style. If these are inauthentic enough, feel free to re-purpose the idea for Hanukkah. Here's the recipe that I used for this batch of potato cakes. 
Since Beck has gotten big enough to care we usually do a breakfast all together one or two days per week - usually on weekends when Jay is with us, but also sometimes Mondays call for pancakes made with all white flour and extra butter, and I'm not above that at all. I'm REALLY hoping to score some leftover mashed potatoes this week to make these on Saturday. They're super easy to make and you could definitely form them the night before and fry them right before breakfast, maybe throw some bacon in a skillet just for good measure.
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