Five quick, comforting dinners from around the world for evenings when you want proper food without turning dinner into a project.
Prep time: 5–10 minutes
Cook time: 10–15 minutes
Difficulty: Very easy
Best for: Busy weeknights, student kitchens and evenings when elaborate cooking has lost its charm
There is a particular sort of optimism involved in planning elaborate weeknight dinners. At ten in the morning, a beautifully roasted chicken with three accompanying vegetables seems entirely reasonable. By seven in the evening, after work, errands, unanswered messages and the gradual disappearance of one's enthusiasm, toast begins to look like a perfectly respectable culinary tradition.
Fortunately, quick dinners need not taste like surrender. A handful of dependable staples can produce something warm, satisfying and genuinely good in fifteen minutes, provided one stops expecting every Tuesday night to end with a chopping board covered in seventeen ingredients.
These five 15-minute weeknight dinners draw on flavours from different cuisines while keeping each ingredient list to five principal ingredients or fewer.
Salt, pepper and water are treated as kitchen basics and are not included in the ingredient count.
Italian-inspired | Ready in 15 minutes
There are few things more reassuring than discovering that dinner can be made almost entirely from pasta and good intentions.