16 Cheap, Healthy Dinners to Make on Repeat

It would be fair to assume that being an editor at New York Times Cooking makes my dinner decisions easier. After all, I’m thumbing through our vast recipe archive almost daily, revisiting old standbys, discovering unsung supper heroes and meeting new classics.

I can tell you, as someone whose choice fatigue looks more like choice paralysis, this is not the case.

So, maybe like you, I rely on our curated recipe collections to be my starting points, and this new lineup of 16 cheap, healthy dinner ideas by Emily Johnson comes at just the right time (tax season).

Many of these are already on a heavy rotation in my home — always a pleasure, chana masala and spicy tuna salad with crispy rice — though I’m frankly surprised that I haven’t already made this larb-like spicy turkey stir-fry with crisp ginger and garlic from Melissa Clark. Ground turkey gets plenty of umami oomph from soy and fish sauces; a good kick from ginger, lime juice and red chile flakes; and flashes of freshness from cilantro and basil. If spicy isn’t your thing, simply pull back or omit the chile, and if you don’t want rice (absolutely cannot relate, but you do you!), you could instead pile this stir-fry on shredded iceberg lettuce.

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Spicy Turkey Stir-Fry With Crisp Ginger and Garlic

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If you’d like more options in this “easy but healthful” category, here is Allison Jiang’s collection of 14 easy, healthy dinner ideas to put on repeat. We published this at the start of the year for anyone looking to refresh and reinvigorate their dinner routine; as we barrel into a new month and (hopefully, soon) a new season, I think the sentiment still stands.

One of my favorite ways to save a bit of money when cooking is to stretch a luxe ingredient over multiple dishes. That jar of cashew butter in the fridge is not meant to be liberally spread on toast but instead to anoint Zainab Shah’s mattar paneer — truly a NYT Cooking classic — and her new cashew butter chicken korma. Three tablespoons of the stuff adds body and creaminess to a tomato sauce spiced with cumin, turmeric and a touch of chile powder; the recipe has already earned five stars and rave reviews.

Feta cheese isn’t the star of Hetty Lui McKinnon’s crispy gnocchi with spinach and feta but rather a supporting player; the plot of this dish is driven by those plump potato nuggets and handfuls of baby spinach. And that spinach, by the way, isn’t boiled or sautéed but instead massaged with the cheese and some olive oil, salt and pepper so that it becomes slightly softened but still keeps plenty of its leafy greenness.

Hetty also has this new yuzu-miso soba noodle soup, which uses bottled yuzu juice to add sparkly shine to the earthy flavors of miso and buckwheat noodles. If you can’t find yuzu juice, swap in lemon, though you might want to start with less than the recipe calls for since lemon is more sour than yuzu. And if you do have yuzu juice, try swapping it in for lemon in your favorite vinaigrettes or dressings (at least, that’s what I’m going to do).

Before we get to dessert: I must apologize for a typo in my Saturday newsletter. The cook time for Ali Slagle’s genius microwave Nutella pudding cake is 45 to 60 seconds, not 45 to 60 minutes, which, eep. But I haven’t heard of a new wave of pudding-induced microwave explosions, so I think we might be OK.

Lastly, here are Zaynab Issa’s chocolate crepes, a recipe that’s surprisingly simple for how fancy-feeling the results are. I’ll let Erica K., a reader, take it from here:

“Made these after the picture stared at me all day as ‘Recipe of the Day.’ They were super easy to whip up while dinner was cooking. The batter stayed in the fridge until we were ready for dessert. Light, not too sweet and paired well with fresh strawberries and whipped cream. For my kids, I put a few chocolate chips on top and folded it over. Will definitely keep this recipe on standby when I want a little chocolate.”