A Dinner To Celebrate Spring, From Christine Flynn’s Cookbook

Dinner can be a restorative break in what is sometimes a chaotic life, especially when you prepare exactly the thing you want to eat in exactly the way you want to eat it. In either case, dinner is a meal worth lingering over.

A Generous Meal is a cookbook, but it is also a sort of quiet manifesto about the pleasures of the table. It is about taking time to cook and eat in a way that is gentle and enjoyable in more ways than one—I find it incredible how little is required to be kind to yourself and to others and how easy it is to create a thoughtful, nourishing meal. This will not look the same to everyone, or the same on any given day, and so there are myriad recipes, which are really just solutions to the puzzle of what’s for dinner tonight. I hope this selection will make cooking and eating dinner more enjoyable for you one night soon—something you look forward to as a way to take care of yourself and the people around you.

Fried Cheese Salad

I do not crave salad because it’s healthy; I crave it because it tastes good. In fact, my only objective in making a salad is that it be as delicious as possible. This is the kind of salad that makes people who hate kale come back for seconds, so don’t hesitate to double the recipe.

Butter Beans In Salsa Verde

There’s something so meaty and more-ish about butter beans, and they look so good on the end of a toothpick that you may feel obligated to serve them when you put out a feast of small dishes for friends. This recipe also fits neatly into the category of “things that happen to be gluten-free and vegan,” which can be handy when you’re serving a group.

Lamb Loin Chops Over Minty Pistachio Butter

Lamb loin chops look like mini T-bone steaks, and they are the perfect size for me. The pistachio butter used in this recipe is not exactly a sauce, but more of a creamy, nutty landing pad for the lamb. It is so good you will want to make extra and schmear it on flatbread, plunk roasted fish in it or dollop it onto charred vegetables.

Spicy Oven-Charred Cabbage And Lemons

To my knowledge, this is an original recipe born out of a “what shall we eat for dinner tonight?” situation. I didn’t have many ingredients in the fridge and, as I recall, they all ended up in the recipe. Don’t be misled by this dish’s origin story. It is so good. The lemon gets a bit charred and chewy, the cabbage is nutty and coated in spicy, garnet-coloured harissa, and the herbs and crispy pita add just the perfect amount of aromatic crunch to cut through the heat.

Plum And Black Pepper Clafoutis

Sometimes I flip the script and make this for my daughters for breakfast. It’s eggy and fruity and a touch sweet, and comes together so quickly.

Excerpted from A Generous Meal by Christine Flynn. Copyright © 2023 Christine Flynn. Photographs by Suech and Beck. Published by Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.