21 Recipes You Should Be Cooking This September

Tap into your stash of canned beans for this one, then add fresh flavors with orange, avocado, and cucumber.

Up your quesadilla game with plump shrimp and smoky bacon. Keeping a container of cooked bacon on hand makes this an even easier lunch option.

A grilled cheese sandwich is always the right choice. Use crusty bread, good cheese, and don’t skimp on the butter for toasting it in the pan. Add in extras like sliced apples, bacon, avocado, chutney, or sliced ham for extra heartiness.

A comforting dish originally made with fregola sarda (a toasted Sardinian pasta) and duck eggs that can be easily modified with Israeli couscous and chicken eggs.

Sliced bread is the perfect blank canvas, ready to be loaded up with ingredients including homemade pesto, avocado, and fried eggs.

The classic combination of grilled sausages and sautéed peppers gets a major upgrade. Chiles and beer add depth of flavor to the peppers while the double starchy sides of parmesan-spiked polenta and grilled bread transform this meal into an al fresco feast.

A simple salad topped with chicken breast can be an uninspired fallback healthy lunch, but in the hands of Emma Bengtsson, executive chef of New York’s legendary modern Swedish restaurant Aquavit, it’s a full-flavored and uplifting thing of beauty that wins on technique.

Roasted chickpeas are the perfect high-protein snack. Dress them up with salt, pepper, chili power, or cumin for an extra flavor kick.

This salad is the little sister of the Provençal dish called a grand aioli. It’s healthy, easy, and a little fancy. To make a half-batch of aioli, whisk it by hand and use 1 egg yolk rather than half of a whole egg.

Roasting radishes gives them a smooth texture and sweet, earthy flavor similar to that of roasted turnips.

Oil-slicked toast, sweet ricotta, ripe figs, and seedy honey are ideal fuel for a day of swimming, surfing, or hiking. If you can’t find ripe fresh figs, grapes make a great sweet substitute.

Ubiquitous hummus has almost become its own food group. Using red lentils instead of chickpeas is brilliant because lentils require no soaking and take 15 minutes to cook.

This technique cooks salmon perfectly every time. The sauce is flavorful and rich, but not heavy–just right for a weeknight.

Although it’s pricier than ordinary ground beef, grass-fed (which is what you usually find at farmers’ markets) goes a long way when rolled into mini meatballs.

Classic ratatouille, typically a side dish, comes front and center as the filling of these inventive tarts.

This soup is especially good on busy weeknights: Set the pot on the counter with rice, toppings, and bowls on the side, for each person to heat and eat whenever. (After 2 hours, though, chill everything and direct the family to the fridge.)

Roasted vegetables are just what we crave in cooler weather. For a next-level dinner, San Francisco recipe developer Julia Lee spoons them over creamy polenta with a lemony salsa verde.

Ryan Farr, founder, and CEO of 4505 Meats in the San Francisco area simmers sausages and vegetables in a “dip” of beer and herbs to infuse them with flavor. Then he turns them on the grill with a “flip” for a little drama and char. Don’t forget a six-pack-plus of lager.

For the easiest prep and biggest hit of flavor, slather the meat with tangy pomegranate-molasses marinade ahead of time; ditto for the tahini dressing. Then it’s quick to grill! Slice the lamb, mix it with mint, pomegranate seeds, and the dressing, and set it out with lettuce and warm pita breads.

Served warm, the charred cabbage leaves play off the coolness of the yogurt dipping sauce, which is fragrant with citrusy sumac and lemon. It’s simple enough to add another head or two of cabbage for a gathering, and any leftovers you can slice into ribbons to top tacos.

The landmark Rancho de Chimayó restaurant, in the town of Chimayó, serves this dish with long-simmered posole corn, stewed pinto beans, and a bit of shredded lettuce and tomato for color. Chimayó chiles can be hard to get and expensive, but more readily available New Mexico chiles, both whole and ground, can be easily swapped in.