Simply Having a Wonderful Weeknight Dinner

The holidays are as good a time as any to go all out with your cooking. For me, that means making relatively simple dishes that I rarely make the rest of the year, rather than spending days in the kitchen doing something one-off and involved. (The exception was December 2020, when I decided to make cassoulet for two adults, a toddler and a baby.)

Sometimes those festive, actually pretty simple dishes, like a roast, are fancy just by virtue of the quality and expense of ingredients involved. Season them right, don’t overcook them and you’ll do fine. More often, though, I’m cooking fish or chicken in an unfussy way. My go-to move: Chop some herbs, scatter them on top and suddenly it’s like you’re at a restaurant.

The top-rated recipes below live at this intersection of easy and fancy, and they’re charmingly casual, too — very “Oh this? I just threw it together.” If you’re a true beginner, start with Melissa Clark’s lemony roast chicken with potatoes, garnished with chopped dill, feta crumbles and extra lemon wedges; no condiments needed on the side.

If you need more holiday inspiration, we’ve got a lot of recipes right here. We also have an amazing new feature on New York Times Cooking: You can automatically convert measurements to metric on our app! Tap the little ruler at the top of the ingredient list on our iOS and Android apps to see. (This is the perfect moment to download our app if you don’t have it yet.)

Requests? Questions? Email me anytime at dearemily@nytimes.com.

I’m also making:

Cranberry spice Bundt cake; creamy Meyer lemon pasta; dumpling noodle soup.

Credit…David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.