Blue skies ahead: 101 low-effort, deeply delicious weeknight dinners that just happen to be healthy, from the James Beard Award-recognized author of I Dream of Dinner


Imagine the ideal dinner: super easy, extremely satisfying, and on top of that, good for you. This might sound like a weeknight fantasy, but recipe developer and longtime New York Times contributor Ali Slagle is an expert at dreaming up dinners that meet your needs. In Sunny with a Chance of Broccoli, she shares a new set of flavor-forward dinner recipes designed to make healthy eating delightful and doable enough to (finally) become routine.

With Ali's 101 recipes, the journey to healthy eating isn't clouded by bland meals or rules and restrictions. It's sunny, and the path is more straightforward than you might think: Eat more plants, many kinds, and lots of them. Not just vegetables, but fruits, legumes, nuts, and seeds, too. There's hope, and it tastes like a hot and sour Roasted Broccoli & Dumpling Salad or bronzed and buttered Fat Pork Chops with Kale & Dates. There's an entire chapter of sheet-pan recipes (including Miso Salmon with Coconut Crunch), another on one-pot soups like Tortellinis in Leek & Lemon Broth, and even one on no-cook dinners, including Smoky Rotisserie Chicken & Lentils. There's more food, not less, including meat and cheese, fat and salt. There are even Tater Tots.

Since Ali's recipes are developed for busy home cooks, every recipe makes a nutritionist-vetted, complete meal with fewer than ten ingredients and in less than one hour, leans on pantry and supermarket staples, and offers swaps and substitutions (including how to make every recipe vegetarian, though half already are). And before the recipes, Ali provides simple strategies to seamlessly bring more plants into any meal. For instance, forget the ratios and boil your grains. Garnish extravagantly. Pickles are plants, too.

And if you didn't eat plants today, don't let it dim your day-tomorrow's also sunny with a chance of broccoli.